What If?: Postmodernism Past and Present

While discussing the short story, Boys, the idea of the past and present coexisting and working together to create the things we experience came up. What if this was fully in effect? Would our lives be immeasurable... lasting an eternity but yet only lasting a minute? Would they become a twisted canvas, colors forever mashing together and creating a mess of inextricable images and shapes. A picture that you could stare at for an eternity or only a minute and see something different each second, but see the whole picture from the very first second. How would our society be different if everyone thought in this way? Would we have a better outlook on life, see the things around us and give them as much worth as they should be given? Would we learn from our mistakes? Would we see our lives as an endless knot of strings... people, places, ideas, all coexisting. Each string knotting and deterring each other as if to influence as many other strings as possible. Every second a new string, a new idea to add to the mess we had already created? Would the future become less important? If we could always see the things in the past would we have enough time to think of the future? If we did not, we would be able to learn from our past mistakes, but we would never have time to fix them in the future. We would never be able to move past our mistakes and look to the future, with our minds always stuck int he past. There is a certain wisdom in living in the present, but all agree that living in the past is never a good idea, because you miss the things going on right now, and in the future. So for this postmodern idea to ever come to fruition in a positive way, the canvas would have to be special... it would need blank spaces. The artist, the thinker, would have to see what they wanted in those spaces, but know that something a piece of art does not turn out how it was imagined, things change. They would work with the other long dried pieces of the canvas to create a masterpiece.