Does anyone else reflect on 'Closer to Cleopatra than...' moments in their personal lives?

[Thurien]

We are told we are closer in time to Cleopatra today than when the first pyramids were built. Then there is Tyrannosaurus Rex which we are closer to than Stegosaurus.

Interesting enough, but what blows my mind more is time distances in my own life. Today I took a detour through the village where I was born and where I returned to live with my young family. There, one of the DC's and I sat on a small hill by the wood's edge and watched young squirrels playing. DC was about 3 and shreiking with joy as they gambled about.

As I drove through today, I reflected that my own early years seemed like a whole eternity before DC came along. It was really like a different life. Yet from the squirrels to now seems like just a decade or two, but still very much connected to now.

Anyone else get these type of thoughts?

I’m going back to university in September at the grand old age of 44 to do my pgce - for most of the kids on the course, they weren’t even born yet when I was their age - I could literally be their parent.

the pre course meeting was hilarious. They are so so young!

they look at me like I’m well old, but in my head I’m still young!! When I was their age it was 2001 - we’d just done the new millennium and smart phones weren’t invented yet. September 11th was just about to happen. (It’s just occurred to me that they have never lived before September 11th happened).

when those kids are the same age as me, I will be hopefully a year or two from retirement. That’s a scary thought!

I definitely think time is going by much quicker.
Years ago school holidays seemed to last an eternity.
And yet when I look back in real time now,there was so little time in reality.

Yep, me too. It's bizarre that my paternal grandfather lived in Monaghan when partition happened, but his girlfriend (my grandmother) lived in Fermanagh, so he moved.

I get sad when I see old photos like at a sports club or school. I think everyone there is dead now, every funny moment or conflicts or friendship just gone. Same with when the last member of a family goes, this is the kind of thing that makes me quite tearful and I'm not one for crying.

@Alalalalalongalalalalalonglonglilong Life is like moving down a very long river, always fluid, always changing. In fact, I find so many analogies about life can be found in rivers.

Without giving too much away, I live near a hill from which three rivers spring. There is nothing noticeable about this hill. It is just a hill cloaked in a patchwork of fields and some trees on its top. But from there, one spring becomes a brook then a river which merges into a bigger river and then exits on the West of the UK. One spring flows down the north side, becomes a river and flows out into the North Sea on the East of the UK and the third flows out into the South and eventually into the Thames Estuary. I liken this hill to birth, the brooks to young children, the very windy young rivers to young adults finding their way and eventually, after further change, entering into the sea and diluting away. It is a very special place and if I sometimes dream of being small enough to sail down each one.

Those pictures, those people are just different rivers, some have already reached the sea, some may still have long and meandering lives. But all are still water, in some way.

Me too. They don't even have to be pictures of anyone I know, or anyone connected to me. Just old photos that cappture a moment in time that is now gone and the subjects gone along with it.

Even if those subjects are still alive, they are not the version of them in the photo anymore.

All those billions of poeple before us, all with their own hopes and fears, wins and losses. All gone. It seems surreal.

Definitely. I love anything to do with time. Did you that 1 billion seconds is the equivalent of 32 years.
Its also fascinating that there will be babies being born all over the world simultaneously as we speak (or rather type). However many will still be born at different times and even have different dates of birth.
Theres a video on YouTube called the Illusion of time. The creator is V source. It’s very interesting

Not sure if this counts but it fascinates me that every year, I will live through the day that will be the future anniversary of my death, completely unaware of its significance. It might be today 😮

I remember soem cafe scientific lecture on time perception and how strange it can be.

DH will be 50 soon - his parents were child free and mortgage from from early 40 and we have years yet.

I met DH at uni his parents were several years younger than I am now.

MIL parents in wedding photo look old - like my DGP I remember being in their 60+ years- dressed old and stooped they were early 40 she was 19 - they lived till their mid 90s - so spent over half their life looking really old.

When I watched the end of Schindler's List when it first came out in 93 that was roughly 50 years after the events, but short enough that some of the real people were still alive to lay a marker on his grave alongside the actors who played them.

Now that's another 30 years on there's only a couple of the very youngest who are still alive.

I had something similar last year. I ended up taking teen DD to a Noel Gallagher concert at the last minute. I couldn’t understand at first why she wasn’t at all excited about going to see someone so famous and then I realised that the equivalent would have been my mum making me go and see someone like The Rolling Stones with her - which I would not have wanted to do as a teenager!!

Yes!! Crazy

I sometimes think about that and it’s not a great feeling. And then there’s my children’s deaths… yeah maybe let’s not go there !

I watch it again and think of it as relevant then realise how long ago it was and all their ages now and I can’t take it 🥲

This reminds me of the year I saw an advert for a Fathers Day music album, featuring Oasis.

I couldn't work out why they were pitching youngster's music to fathers. And then it clicked. I was old enough that my generation, who listened to Oasis as teenagers, were now fathers....

Yes, this always gets to me. I waste so much time day dreaming and wondering about pointless stuff and then realise all those people in the past will have done the same. All those conversations and laughing at stupid moments - all gone. We're just reduced to a few key dates in the end, if we're lucky. For most people, there is no record that they ever existed at all.

Which, ultimately, gives me some comfort. Very little you worry about now will have any significance in the end.

My people. I cant get my head around it. Stuff like I'm talking to youngsters about the leaving cert, and they ask how mine was.......21 years ago. Or a year an event happened. They were either babies or not born, I was a grown up.

I think the reason we think people looked older than their years in the past is because the dated hairstyles makes us perceive them as older. A couple of the daughters in this photo from the 50s are probably teens but look much older. The 2nd and 3rd daughter.

Time is a very strange thing. Events can feel simultaneously like yesterday and a lifetime ago. I did have a bit of a turn when I discovered that Thatcherism and the Miners' Strike were on the A level history syllabus though. It doesn't seem reasonable that events from my youth are history as it's so recent. But then I remembered that WW2 had only been over for 20 years when I was born, so was less than 40 years before I did my A levels and that was definitely history as far as I was concerned. To my parents it must have felt very different.
It also blows my mind that at the very beginning of my career I treated people who were born at the end of the 19th century and served in WW1 and now there are barely any WW2 veterans left and we are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century. I once had a patient who had worked as a farm boy for Beatrix Potter .That amazed me. There I was talking to an, admittedly elderly, man who had known someone who was to me a historical figure known only from black and photos - a huge gap yet a close connection at the same time.

This photo might be clearer

I checked who the 10th president was - John Tyler born in 1790, and thought it can't be possible, but it is!

Tyler and his son Lyon remarried much younger women and fathered children at advanced ages, such that Tyler's daughter Pearl did not die until the 157th year after her father's birth. As of January 2024, Tyler still has one living grandson (234 years after John Tyler's birth) through Lyon, making him the earliest former president with a living grandchild. This grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928 and maintains the family home, Sherwood Forest Plantation, in Charles City County, Virginia.[197][198][199]

All together now by The Farm popped up on YT the other day.
All the old people must be dead and that made me sad.

I found out recently that the ancient Egyptians had their own archeologists who studied the artefacts and structures of the even more ancient Egyptians. My mind was blown.

No she died in 30BC she was born 70BC. It is weird to think she was alive 30 years before Jesus.

I left school 42 years ago - when I write it down, it seems incredible! And 42 years before that, DM was coming up to her 1st birthday.