Forever: for all future time; for always.
Forever is a long time. So long such that I think that humans are unable to grasp the concept of forever. Perhaps we are not, but the reality is that we have made forever a non-word, reducing its meaning to 'a very very long time.' But when it comes to a word like forever, no matter how much time you reduce it to, it defrauds what the word is. Forever analytically means 'an irreducible amount of time.' I think that perhaps if we understood how robust the word 'forever' actually is, it would change the way that we act and think. Very few things are forever; there is certainly an argument that could be made that analytically there can only be one thing that exists that is eternal, akin to infinite.
I believe that what I do on earth echoes into eternity. This means that if I believe that it is truly forever, then that has got to affect the way that I move and live and have my being. In thinking about forever and believing that forever actually exists and that perhaps reality is the only thing that exists that is forever, I want my life, 80-100 years at most, to reflect that. I have to live for something beyond myself and my life because to think about living for just me, it seems inherently selfish. I do not want to be selfish, so I have got to reorient myself to eternity. I have got to reorient myself to the reality of life beyond this brief, blink-and-you-miss-it life.
I guess that what I am trying to get at is something that I have been saying for years; I do not want to strip words of their potency. Forever is a word with great potency and the danger of parabolic speaking is exactly that words lost so much of their potency. I want to behave, being someone who believes in forever, as though 'forever' means forever. That has got to be my prerogative. I do not want to act as though I can settle for 'a very very long time;' that is not the truth. I want to live and live well and live as though my life affects forever. Eighty years seems like too little of an amount of time to waste in the grand scheme of eternity, but possibly not in the grand scheme of 'a very very long time,' and therein lies the danger. Something that has no end is something that we as humans do not even have a reference for; everything ends. It is quite literally incomprehensible simply because our brains do not function in such a way as to be able to understand it.
This is not a matter of 'try harder in your attempt to understand the true definition of this word,' it is instead a matter of acting as if forever is true and real. Time will only tell what the consequences to believing and acting in this manner are.
On the lighter side: I have been enjoying cold brew coffee very much this year and I think that it is the best way to make coffee. Not only does it taste better, but it is lower acidity so it is healthier as well. It takes a tiny bit of foresight, but overall I think that it is worth it and the benefits far outweigh the small cost, especially because you can still get bed coffee anywhere. Cold brew can also make bad coffee tasty!
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