Higher Obedience

My fourth year of university just started today with two classes. One was in the evening and was terribly painful. Even though the teacher is to blame to a certain extent, he was not the only one making these three hours painful. The fact that I have a cold didn’t help ’cause it’s getting up in my brain (really). There’s also the fact that the room was packed full. There was no empty seat left, serious. I had never seen that. And because the room was so  full, well it was pretty, pretty hot in the room. On top of that, the content of what was taught was not interesting, it was more an overview of some grammar terminology long forgotten (well, to a great extent anyways… I personally have issues with grammar terminology, I simply don’t see the point of it all, but anyways).

But I remembered one thing the teacher said. I don’t know why but he was talking about language and how it must have taken so long for human beings to create language, maybe millions of years and how extraordinary an exploit that was and how language allowed us to think in time, that is how at the beginning we only thought in small terms about time, mostly about the present and the very near future (the next seconds) and how slowly we were able to think about the future in greater extents, and then the past  and finally relaizing that we can think about the future going on forever and also understand our past, our origins and how we now know that the earth is six billion years old and such. As he was talking, he drew a timeline on the board, the earth’s timeline. On the “future” side, he drew the infinity sign to show that we now were going forever in the future and he als, to my surprise, drew an infinity sign on the leftside, our past. That was a mistake. On the one hand he was saying that the earth had a beginning and on the other hand he drew a sign that was saying that earth had no beginning. I thought it was interesting. I thought his picture was a great picture of our humanity’s timeline actually.