Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Yes, I know it’s not cherry blossom time here in the northern hemisphere, but maybe substitute autumn leaves instead. The poem is more about our allotted lifespan, and making the most of it. Also, having reached my threescore years and ten, I might not be here to write this piece come the spring. In fact, owing to the transient nature of life, neither might you. (Hopefully we both will be, but you get the point.)
The equinox is a day of balance between light and dark, before we head into the shorter days and longer nights of winter. It feels like a poignant turning point in the year, and for me a time of reckoning, weighing up what I’ve achieved and what I haven’t. Watching the hedgerows fill with ripening berries and the leaves start to fall, I think more about the interconnectedness of life and death, the idea of infinity, and about the strange nature of existence.
There’s not nearly enough time left for me to come to grips with it all. I’ve already started to aim for smaller goals. I’m unlikely to achieve, say, world domination, or learn how to read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. I’m not even sure whether I have time to finish another novel, though I’ll probably make a start…
Anyway, according to Einstein's theory, time is relative. I can’t hold the concept of E=mc² in my mind long enough to explain it to you, so here's a terrible short version written by Google AI (sorry, but it would take me eons)
‘Relativity is a theorem formulated by Albert Einstein, which states that space and time are relative, and all motion must be relative to a frame of reference. It is a notion that states laws of physics are the same everywhere.’
Great. But my concept of relativity isn’t based on Einstein’s mathematical formula. It’s more about the way half an hour in the dentist’s chair feels far longer than half an hour out walking in the country, or watching a film. And how although the moon is only moving away from the earth by a tiny fraction every year, over a lifetime of 70 years, it’s moved 2.66 meters (about 8.7 feet) farther away. That’s more than twice the width of my desk. I’m so damn old, I can measure my life in geological time.
Thinking about evolution, I wonder how we’ve had moments of genius like inventing the wheel or wellington boots on one hand, yet somehow we’re still dominated by very rich, stunningly ignorant white men on the other. Homo Sapiens has been around for approx 300,000 years. If the average lifespan is 70 years, that means it's only been 4285 lifespans along the line of your ancestors until you got here. And for a lot of that time, there were other species of humans around too - we just happened to take over. If Donald Trump represents the pinnacle of our evolution, one can’t help wondering if neanderthals would have done far better…
Basically, this is all just an effort to try and explain what relativity means to me, and why we should probably try to appreciate every moment of life - even if that particular moment is in the dentist’s chair. The equinox is a good time to think things over.
I am still writing, though currently mostly non fiction while I skirt around the edges of the next book. But even though I'm definitely closer to the end of life than the beginning, perhaps I should reconsider the idea of world domination. Donald is a lot older than me and look at the mess he's making of it. Perhaps it’s never too late after all?
Lu Hersey
Web: Lu Hersey
Patreon: Writing the Magic
Substack: An old hag's snippets of folklore, myth and magic
(This post is adapted from one I wrote for substack)
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