Circles

Children encourage us to preserve our world for the future and thus we act properly now. We try to stop global warming not because it will be the cause of our deaths during our generation, but because it could perhaps affect more immediately the lives of my son, your daughter, his grandchild, their great-grandchildren. It is an attestment to the nature of living animals, one could say, an attestment to the maturity of the human brain, that we have the forsight to protect the future of our race, most directly through the preservation of our own offspring. Through our offspring, we each have an individual stake in our own future. Continued stake in said future through familial ties is what makes our own actions timeless, forever important and significant, and also, forever repeating in the passing down of knowledge, ways of life, and human nature, generation upon generation.

Nietzsche theorized about eternal return, that is, the propostion that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in a similar form, an infinite number of times. Eternal return must be the nature of our world: without the recurring nature of time, we would be insignificant, left to exist in this time and only this time, and essentially, time would stop: our actions lose weight in light of their static quality. However, as opposed to Nietzsche's propostion that time is constantly hanging, not linear at all but rather constantly in motion, the same events lapping and overlapping, I would offer that time recurs as we develop, our spirits actually forever floating from grandfather to mother to child, actions recurring, with an elusion that we each possess a static, individual, nature: through this static quality, we are encouraged to "do something meaningful" during the short period of each and every single human life.

This idea is elusive. If my actions during this life are continued through the generations following me, and if my actions now are really only a continuation of those of my ancestors, are my actions in the here and now still meaningful or unique? They must be. In fact, I have even more incentive to work hard, set goals, and accomplish those goals. I have more incentive to dream big and see where my dreams take me. I will make my children's lives better and more productive if I push myself, and I am making my ancestors lives worthwhile, all suffering and hard work included, through bringing anything that they either dreamed, or did not have the capacity to dream, into fruition. Heaviness in my life, the essence of what makes my existence worthwhile, lies in my desire to work hard for the future and preserve the past. Lightness lies in the desire to live in the now and enjoy life for what it is. A balance of the two is what gives the past, present, and future an infinite amount of meaning.

In essence, as the circle of life continues, so does Nietzsche's circular time.