A friend has been posting pictures from the past on Facebook. There are graduation shots and church assemblies, community picnics and weddings. I have seen images of my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins and neighbors. It is a jolt to recall the way we wore our hair in the sixties, and the fashion trends of the forties. One of the feelings that comes up is tenderness. 

Everyone seems very young, but that is only compared to today. Hair is darker, backs are straighter. 

There is a picture of my father with one of his best friends, presiding at a meeting.  Were they really old enough to be the bishop and secretary of the clergy? I feel a surge of compassion for the hard things I know are in their future, in relation to the photo, but in the past in respect to now. It is the closest I get to being outside of time, to realize that many of the concerns that clutter our attention are temporary. Fleeting, even. Surely those emergencies that hijacked my father's energies no longer have a hold on him. His wife in the psychiatric hospital, his brother's death, his emphysema all felt like cataclysmic events at the time. But after thirty or a hundred years they lost their impact. 

Although I do not know most of the people in the photographs, it gives me a sense of the human condition. We are each part of a larger tribe trying to find our way. It helps erode the compulsive urge to see myself as the center of the universe.