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| In the same place, captured by the same man, over the years from single-pregnant-having baby-toddler mom |
The older I become, the more I think that time is one of the most powerful variables in this universe. Dozens of theories about it, countless philosophers trying to comprehend it, yet no one can make it in the direction that humans want. No wonder that in many movies, humans create a storyline about a villain wanting immortality, or the capabilities to stop or turn back time. Time just goes by in its merciless pace, turning the babies into elders and steel into rust.
In the last few years, I have been helping to popularize the field of paleobotany in Indonesia. Not gonna lie, I didn’t care that much at the beginning, seeing plants turning into rocks after a million years being exposed to water and minerals beneath us. But this mid-year, when I was busy prepping for its first-ever creative exhibition in Indonesia (and the first scientific exhibition that I curate in my life!), I realize something poetic.
The exhibition needed to be prepped as a part of a larger thematic exhibition about “library” (pustaka - in Bahasa Indonesia), so I needed to craft some storytelling angle to make those cold fossil woods equipped with the ability to “communicate” something, and I chose to make it a “library of time”. We all know how tree rings indicate the age of a (dicot & conifer) wood, mostly, but apparently, fossil wood does more than that. It captures and preserves time in its own body and petrifies its organic material into hard minerals. If you think about it, it is so poetic. Many tell us nothing is forever, but they are (at least for a million years). It made me contemplate life, about so little time we have compared to the time this Earth has passed.
How do we humans petrify the intangible memories? I have a grandmother with dementia (and many of my friends in my circle have parents with it too), and I started to think about how fragile our brains are in keeping millions of experiences that we had in the past. My grandmother no longer remembers that his husband, her son, and her daughter all have passed away, and she always thinks that I’m still in college. The only way humans can encapsulate those memories from fading away is really just to take pictures and videos. That is why, growing older, I never blame when I see someone taking so many pictures when traveling. Two or three decades later, those pictures will help us remember who we were and why we are here at this point in life.
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| Me being so pregnant and still needed to work at the fossil wood artisan |
Again, this is the perk of having my foot in both STEM and social sciences, as both of them give a very deep and beautiful perspective of life. Recently, I also watched Tom Hanks’ movie “Here,” and it perfectly captures what I think about the relativity of time. When we were young, we thought we had all the time in the world, but when our significant others started to leave us and teach us about death, that perspective significantly changed. Losing my mom young and my first child in a miscarriage, I am grateful for all this knowledge and experience, which makes me enjoy life more and the pleasure of watching my son grow. I don’t have the ability to stop or preserve the time I spent with him and my husband; in the blink of an eye, he’s no longer a baby and running around the house trying to bite my husband’s foot, and I know in the next blink, he’ll be in college and we will be alone again in our house. I now can’t agree more with the saying, the days are long but the years are short.
Oh, time. The merciless and omnipotent force, with only a few who are fortunate enough to be able to petrify them forever.
