Out of time (final) [2nd attempt]

Nicola Tesla was, and still is, a prime example of a man “out of time.” His visionary ideas, such as AC current and radio towers, were ahead of their time when he invented them(WhatIs.com). Other inventions of his, like the “death ray” and the wireless energy converter, were so far ahead of their time that he was thought to be mad. As he progressed in age, the political party of the era forced ever shorter deadlines on his work. He was out of time, most of the time and had to work against time to get any of his inventions or experiments done on time. To top it all off, when he had died the U.S. Government had seized all of his unpublished work (WhatIs.com) so that any potentially harmful devices that they did not sanction would not be created, used, or even fully known by the world and its history for all time.

I, myself, have been “out of time” in various forms. One time, I was fully removed from the flow of time when I became exceptionally ill. I had caught a virus, that I do not remember the name of, that caused me to become unable to move, eat, or speak clearly. The bed that I slept on became my sanctuary, and by the time I recovered, a whole week had passed without my noticing, but to my parents I had seemed fully conscious. This ordeal had occurred when I was about seven years old. Later, but less consequentially, I had ran “out of time” on a paper that I had written for Mrs. Boresen, like now, and had to essentially rush “against” time to finish on schedule.

My family, like most others, has at least three living generations. A trend in my mother's side of the family was that most died with only a whisper. By this I mean, they developed either cancer, Alzheimer's, or both and died in a relatively unassuming fashion. My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer about a year before he died, he had also developed, what appeared to be, Alzheimer's. The aged man became completely unaware of the flow of life around him; he had been shot up with morphine to dull the pain, but this had mostly only made it so he could not communicate with the world outside of his body. On the day before he had finally given out, he had come rushing face first back into the world of time that he had been removed from for over two years, and was able to converse with my grandmother for one last time. Shortly after my grandmother had left for sleep, my grandfather was pronounced to be dead. At least I can say to myself, and others, that he died peacefully in his sleep.

My grandmother had been “out of time,” before she died, in a substantially different manner. When she was diagnosed, she had seemed healthy and fairly strong, for her age, but as time went on, she slowly deteriorated into being bedridden for the remainder of her life. As the cancer had dragged her defiant spirit into the “place without time,” she had attempted to continue with her life as it was before she had cancer. Her church choir was, in my opinion, the “best thing since sliced bread” to her and her downtrodden facade; she attended every practice she could, and even performed during an Easter sermon at LifeBridge Christian Church's main campus. Alas, to her cold disapproval, was not to last indefinitely; she had to eventually succumb to her unassuming fate, and die with some dignity left. She also, I can proudly say, died peacefully in her sleep. Her breathing simply stopped, and was pronounced dead around 2 a.m., much to the dismay of my mother, who was looking after her at the time.

Her faith, like many others, had invented a place where time was “out” and substance didn't exist. This was to be called “Limbo,” a realm outside of time, and beyond our perception; a spiritual/metaphysical realm where pain, pleasure, time, and even existence do not take form (thefreedictionary.com/limbo). It is a place removed from the natural, or unnatural, order of the universe as we see it today. Another name for the realm is Purgatory, the underworld in many mythologies, such as the Roman Pantheon, the Viking Asgard, and the western Christian Faith. Some scientists refer to this place as “the space between spaces,” in an effort to appeal to the side of reason when talking to a populace deeply involved in either faith or technology worship, but mostly only the realm of the numbers, and the “other” realm of imagination, can completely explain the intricacies of “limbo” and its relation to the definition of “out of time.”

What is it, to be out of time? For many, it is to run against time to get a deadline accomplished. But for others it is, in very real sense, to be completely removed from the normal flow of time, such as incapacitation.

To go by the legally written Oxford Dictionary definition, out of time means to be removed from “the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another” or, to “run” against the natural flow of a short period of perception. (dictionary.com).

Me, I think that definition does not fully impart what it means to be out of time. To be “out of time”, in most cases, is to run against the clock to finish something, or to be in the final stages of one's life when you know that the inevitable is only around the corner, like what happened to my grandparents. Another way of seeing it is to be completely removed from the flow of time itself, A.K.A. Nickola Tesla. Mostly, it is when a person refuses to let go of a previous time frame, in life that is constantly changing, and forgetting to live in the present. To end on a better note, to be “out of time” is not always to be considered a negative in life; those in “the Deep Freeze,” cryogenics, have a chance to see if the world is to move forward in its advances, or if the time comes, to guide with their wisdom and “fix” the world.


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