I spent last night changing. I moved summer suits out of my closet; some went to the cleaners, some, that I hadn’t gotten around to wearing this season, went straight to the cedar closet. The longer I live, the more unpredictable life seems, but it is still predictable that every fall, things will change.
A few days ago, I took Mariah, my oldest daughter, to the airport. She got off the plane in Quito, Ecuador. Mariah is going to build nature trails in the Amazon as part of an eco-tourism project. The concept, if I understand correctly, is to attract tourists to countries in economic need, while preserving the natural environment.
After being trained, she will teach adult Ecuadorians what she has learned. At other times, she will be working with the children. From Quito, she will take a bus to a village, then down a dirt path where she will walk several hours into the rain forest. She is traveling with her 20-year-old first cousin, Adhar. These girls are driven to do good. Their courage and sense of adventure is admirable, and on top of it, their efforts will earn them college credits.
For many of us, college courses consisted of history, science, math and English. The really wild electives were things like psychology or anthropology. Now, students get credits for almost anything. College is changing, too.
Only a couple of weeks ago, the entire family drove west to leave my middle daughter, Sam, in a suburb of Los Angeles to begin schooling at Whittier College. Children leaving are some of our biggest changes.
It’s easy in the world of law to lose track of time, to get too busy and to fail to appreciate the subtle changes. Often, we are so embroiled in fights for our clients, contests with opposing lawyers, or the race to accumulate things, that we fail to notice the texture of life. Usually, we are so engrossed in the “importance” of our undertakings, that we fail to appreciate our precious moments with our family, friends, clients, or our opportunities in general. Sometimes we need perspective.
The trip west included rafting on the Colorado River and stops at Arches National Park in Utah and the Grand Canyon.
At Arches, we learned about the comings and goings of oceans, the evaporation of the water and the resulting mile-deep salt basin formed over millions of years of changing weather. We learned about the subtle sculpting of sandstone that resulted in the spectacular stone arches that attract tourists there today.
The Grand Canyon offers perspective in a way only nature can. We were told that the formation of the land which makes up today’s Grand Canyon can be traced to the beginning of the earth.
To aid in our understanding, time was discussed in the framework of a Grand Canyon 24-hour day. We were told that the chiseling of the canyon, done by the Colorado River and other natural forces, took place about six million years ago. But in terms of the Grand Canyon’s 24-hour clock, that sculpting began at 11:58 p.m. — with only two minutes left in the hypothetical day that brings us to the present. I think the park ranger said it was with only 43 seconds left in that day that man appeared on earth, and with only 10 seconds left that man began any form of recorded history. Those types of statistics for earth alone, not to mention the billions of other planets floating in space, have a tendency to make us feel insignificant.
The next time we are stressed over a motion to compel discovery, we might reduce that stress by putting our motion in its proper context. Using the formation of the Grand Canyon as a backdrop, many of the things we do are not terribly important, and certainly not particularly lasting.
Most of the changes that seem important to us don’t make much of an impact in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, we, and we alone, are the ones here now. We are the only ones, who, if we take the time, can appreciate the timelessness of the Grand Canyon, or the beauty of our children venturing out on to their own paths. The changes of our lives may never be recorded, still, I plan on watching the maples change this fall.
—Mark Levison is an attorney in St. Louis and a member of The Levison Group, which provides columns for this newspaper.
He may be reached at [email protected].