THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Here’s an awesome fact: when the universe was very young — something like a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second — it underwent an incredible growth spurt.
During this burst of expansion, which is known as inflation, the universe grew exponentially (quickly and by huge amounts) and doubled in size at least 90 times.
And another thing: for the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, scientists say the intense heat from the universe’s creation made it essentially too hot for light to shine.
Ever since, though, the universe, and all that dwell therein, have been in a constant flux, or, as the late grandmother of my children was wont to say: nothing stays the same, everything changes. Which is reassuring, in that anything life cares to throwat you will not be forever and you will come through it, hopefully a little wiser, if perhaps a tad more cautious.
I am certainly a lot more cautious (and sceptical) than I was 20 years ago, or than when I was a teen, though whether I am wiser or not is a moot matter.
We grow, we move on, we change, even if sometimes we think ourselves and the society we inhabit laid low by wars and rumours of war and political or economic inertia. As one-time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said: “He who rejects change is the architect of decay.”
The most telling change in my life has happened in the past 10 years, since my wife and I divorced – although it’s all very amicable now. Since then, my children have grown into fully-fledged adults that would make any parent proud; my marriage to their mother failed to last the course, a regret to me.
To go back now to the time we reared our children, well… you can’t go back, can you? For were you to do, nothing is the same.
I am reminded of Daphne du Maurier in her novel Rebecca: “This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved between these walls. That was yesterday. Today, we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.”
There’s another way of looking at it as Nelson Mandela said upon his release after 28 years of incarceration and whom I had the honour and privilege of meeting 21 years ago (a 10 minute private audience in Dublin’s Four Seasons Hotel): “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged and find how the ways in which you have altered.”
I wouldn’t want to go back: for one thing, for to attempt to recapture those idealised times would prove futile; for another, change should be welcomed, for it is a good thing — it can even prove liberating and empowering.
It is all too easy to see ourselves as central to everything — life, love and the whole damn thing, when we’re not but a tiny speck in an expanding universe and multiple universes.
And so I count myself blessed by the essence of it all, the wonders and vagaries of nature, the unfathomable size of our expanding universe and my place in it, and, not least, by the challenges change brings me.
In The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham wrote: “Nothing in the world is permanent and we are foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”
Enjoy your day. It will not pass this way again…
