I've often envisioned having an epiphany where I "felt" the passage of time. I imagined it would feel like when I put my hand in a brook or stream and feel the water rushing past it. Or perhaps it would feel more like riding a boat in that stream, or riding on a train and looking out at the passing buildings. Those buildings are the moments of your life, and once you have passed one, you will never see it again. You watch it grow smaller in the distance behind you, and you can try to remember what it looks like, but you will never truly see it again.

As depressing as that idea is, I've never "felt" it, like feeling a river. But, I think I've come pretty close. In fact, I come close often, though I didn't, at first, realize it. And having come close to it, I'm sure I really want it.

You see, I have felt the passage of time not in a tactile sense as I had sought-for, but in an emotional sense. This feeling hits you anywhere, anytime and rarely when you expect it. It is triggered by an unlikely source: our sense of smell. Yes, there is more power for recall in smell than in any other sensation. The autumn wind will cut through Arkansas and it will put me into a place long forgotton, perhaps not even a concrete memory, but it will have more power and gravity than any visual recall ever could, and I will know I've lost something.

For a smell to trigger a feeling of memory (or a memory of feeling) you must have a lot of emotion tied to the smell . . . or rather, you must have a lot of emotion tied to the people, places and things you associate with that smell. I've never really known a smell to trigger a memory of a negative emotion, or at least I've never embraced it when it does. Maybe that's just me; I'd rather embrace the memory of positive emotions, of joys, though it is horribly bittersweet. Because when that vague and powerful memory hits me, I long for something. I'll drive past a pond and from the smell I will know instantly that I have intimately known just such a pond somewhere in my past. I will know that I was once having a better time, that I was experiencing more joy, than I am now. I will walk out of Walmart and suddenly feel that I belong somewhere else, that I shouldn't be there, that life is going on somewhere out there and I'm missing it! I feel this because I know that behind me, in my past, there is a good time, a powerful positive emotion, that I cannot have back. This wind, this smell, is incomplete without the full experience, and so I feel incomplete, and it breaks my heart, and I feel the passage of time, and I hate it!

And so I want to get out of this damned town! Even if I must go to Butthole, Arkansas, I need to live in joy. I must run to where-ever I can tie more and more joys to every smell I can find! And I never want to stop, so that when the powerful recall in the wind finds me again, I can just give it a nod and a wink and turn my attention back to the joys I'm currently experiencing.
And if you understand God and his gifts of love and redemption, as I believe I do, you will know that joy is found in people! I don't mean that it is found in every person and every circumstance, but speaking generally, I promise you, your joy will be found in people.

And so I want to stay as far from that epiphany as possible. Because if that sense of longing inside me that the wind brings were to become truly tactile, it would kill me.