Bob

I met Bob in 1970 when we were both Sophomores at Garland High School. Although we had no classes together, we found ourselves standing outside the same door at the end of lunch each day waiting to enter the building. Setting foot inside that building prior to the end-of-lunch bell was strictly forbidden so we milled around outside and talked.

Bob was a short kid (maybe 5’6”) with a slight build, curly blond hair, pale skin, and a great personality. He also had a fantastic memory. Even though we never had a class together or even talked much during our Junior and Senior years at school, Bob greeted me by name when we bumped into each other in Austin, Texas almost eight years later.

Bob’s recognition of me was even more astounding due to the fact that he was totally blind and recognized my voice — a voice he probably hadn’t heard in all those years. Standing there in the middle of a busy sidewalk, we caught up on personal history. Bob had spent the last four years in a special program, preparing to begin classes at UT.

When I think back on our after-lunch conversations in 1970, I wonder how Bob visualized things like flowers, automobiles, and people. Although he could feel textures, smell aromas, and hear descriptions of colors, Bob had been blind from birth, so I wonder what imagery words like “Red, Blue, Bright, Dim, and Hazy” conjured up in his mind. Yet, somehow, Bob had always been able to carry on a coherent conversation and grasp every concept.

Seeing the Unseen
In a lot of ways, you and I are much like Bob. We’ve seen only a tiny percentage of what has occurred — mostly due to constraints of time and space.

Imagine that we were in a large gymnasium with a perfectly flat and uncluttered, white wall. Now, imagine that we took a black marker and drew a timeline in the middle of that wall that was thirteen feet and eight inches long. If every foot of that timeline represents a billion years, the entire length of the timeline would represent natural history.*

*Note: To get an idea of just how big a billion is, a quarter of a billion pennies, each 1/16” thick, stacked one atop the other, would reach just past the moon.

Let’s go back to the left end of that timeline and put a dot that represents the Big Bang. Now, if we scoot over to the right end of the timeline (which represents today) and measure backwards only one eighth of an inch, that represents the roughly ten thousand years of recorded history we know about. We’re hypothesizing about the other 99.99% of that timeline.

That’s time. As far as space goes, we’re equally in the dark. Our highest resolution satellite photo of the moon’s surface breaks down to a tiny square that represents eight tenths of a mile along each side. There’s a whole lot of detail in that single pixel that we’ve never been able to see. On the other end of the scale, we’ve never actually seen sub-atomic elements of physics but we know they’re there. Like it or not, we live by faith in that which we cannot see.

Back to Our Wall
Now, assume that there’s another timeline parallel to our timeline, but this one spans the entire wall. In fact, it goes out the doors on each end of the wall and keeps going as far as we can see in both directions. This timeline probably shouldn’t even be called a “timeline” because it isn’t constrained by time or space. It’s real but we’ve just never seen it.

The timeline is there because something created the Big Bang but we lack the ability to experience it via our limited senses. Our dilemma is that since we’ve never actually seen what’s on that other timeline, we must visualize it based on our imperfect experience, much like my friend, Bob, had to imagine what “Red, Blue, Bright, Dim, and Hazy” meant.

Do we pretend that the other timeline doesn’t exist? Do we re-imagine it to meet our personal needs? Or do we strive to understand it despite our sensory handicap?

I’d sure like to ask Bob those questions.

A meeting of great minds who think alike