Musings on Time
S'pose there's nothing new in pondering time around the beginning of a new year. Then again, as I get older the idea of time becomes more elastic to me. Humans are obsessed with it, parsing it into the tiniest units that are beyond our reckoning except via computer and sophisticated math equations. Athletes win in hundredths of seconds now (there can be no ties), atomic clocks, geo-synchronization. We manipulate it with leap years and bi-annual hour-long flip-flops. And who decided what a "second" was in the first place?
Conversely much of time is far outside our comprehension - cosmic ages passing in billions of years with billions or trillions more to come… I have trouble thinking past this coming weekend. To be truly immortal, to watch time flow through not just humanity but through a cosmos that has not yet blinked since homo sapiens sapiens first evolved, would have to drive one insane. If the mind cannot grasp the enormity of forever and fragments, I think it must be like trying to hold running water in your fingers.
I have come to believe time isn't a linear plane, but a fluid and changeable dimension of possibility. I frequently seem to clue in to the passage of time only by suddenly noting how rapidly it has passed - where did yesterday/last week/my childhood go? But in anticipation time can be slower than a slug in tree sap - when will it be lunch time, forever until vacation, the child is never coming. There are events that mark time so indelibly they become measuring sticks of a different kind: after my first kiss; before I knew better; when I lost my virginity; the day my father/mother/sibling/child/friend died; the moment I realized I didn't love him/her anymore. Ideas of time so deeply rooted in our language and therefore our measurable perceptions, yet completely immensurable. Time is slipping away, it's nap time, free time, time for a meeting, nighttime is the right time, we've arrived on time, it's about damn time. And let us never forget, occasionally it is clobbering time.
The hoary chestnut about time being slow when you're a child, then picking up in adulthood and dragging again when you're elderly is both true and not. My grandmother is 90+ and time doesn't slow for her. It almost seems irrelevant, as though it can no longer affect her. Mentally, entire days or weeks pass for her without notice, their sameness blending into a melange of sleeping, watching TV and forcing herself to eat enough to keep going. I don't think she's unhappy with this, perhaps tired, but she tells me she knows someday her time will come.
Which brings me to my final thought - when we die, do we pass outside of time? Do good Christians go to a heaven without clocks for eternity, good Muslims to a paradise without end? I think good Buddhists disperse their consciousness (if they've upgraded from the rebirth cycle), but does that make them part of the overarching cosmological time line, or are they utterly outside of time? If you reincarnate as a Pagan, Hindu, Buddhist, etc have you stayed in the same time line, or is it a new one for that changed awareness? Is time something that can even be escaped - a universe filled with bubbles that can be popped or merged or smooshed close together so one could slither between the membranes? Or is it something so constant, so fundamental… something created before all the elements of the original singularity that created our 'Verse? Did time give rise to everything, or is it a product of that first birthing?
These are the questions that plague me on a Thursday in January. Isn't it time you got back to work?
Conversely much of time is far outside our comprehension - cosmic ages passing in billions of years with billions or trillions more to come… I have trouble thinking past this coming weekend. To be truly immortal, to watch time flow through not just humanity but through a cosmos that has not yet blinked since homo sapiens sapiens first evolved, would have to drive one insane. If the mind cannot grasp the enormity of forever and fragments, I think it must be like trying to hold running water in your fingers.
I have come to believe time isn't a linear plane, but a fluid and changeable dimension of possibility. I frequently seem to clue in to the passage of time only by suddenly noting how rapidly it has passed - where did yesterday/last week/my childhood go? But in anticipation time can be slower than a slug in tree sap - when will it be lunch time, forever until vacation, the child is never coming. There are events that mark time so indelibly they become measuring sticks of a different kind: after my first kiss; before I knew better; when I lost my virginity; the day my father/mother/sibling/child/friend died; the moment I realized I didn't love him/her anymore. Ideas of time so deeply rooted in our language and therefore our measurable perceptions, yet completely immensurable. Time is slipping away, it's nap time, free time, time for a meeting, nighttime is the right time, we've arrived on time, it's about damn time. And let us never forget, occasionally it is clobbering time.
The hoary chestnut about time being slow when you're a child, then picking up in adulthood and dragging again when you're elderly is both true and not. My grandmother is 90+ and time doesn't slow for her. It almost seems irrelevant, as though it can no longer affect her. Mentally, entire days or weeks pass for her without notice, their sameness blending into a melange of sleeping, watching TV and forcing herself to eat enough to keep going. I don't think she's unhappy with this, perhaps tired, but she tells me she knows someday her time will come.
Which brings me to my final thought - when we die, do we pass outside of time? Do good Christians go to a heaven without clocks for eternity, good Muslims to a paradise without end? I think good Buddhists disperse their consciousness (if they've upgraded from the rebirth cycle), but does that make them part of the overarching cosmological time line, or are they utterly outside of time? If you reincarnate as a Pagan, Hindu, Buddhist, etc have you stayed in the same time line, or is it a new one for that changed awareness? Is time something that can even be escaped - a universe filled with bubbles that can be popped or merged or smooshed close together so one could slither between the membranes? Or is it something so constant, so fundamental… something created before all the elements of the original singularity that created our 'Verse? Did time give rise to everything, or is it a product of that first birthing?
These are the questions that plague me on a Thursday in January. Isn't it time you got back to work?