Always Time
“Because I know that time is always time, and place is always and only place”-T.S Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Time has always been somewhat of a sore spot for us humans. We are after all creatures of time, a being whose existence is tied to the flow that pushes us forward. It is a peculiar thing indeed, sometime we wish it to flow faster, like when in class or in office hours where the minutes drag on for eternities. Other times when we wish it to be slower, when we are with friends, lovers, loved ones, just when we want a moment to last forever, it passes by within the blink of an eye. Always contradictive and always elusive, we have tried our best in cataloguing it, quantifying it but it seems that for all our efforts we really can’t seem to get the best of it.
For us its a certainty for all we know it only goes forward and nowhere else. A driving force that forces us to confront our realities, our age, our relationships, the things that we impart to each other. It is a curious thing that we really can’t live without. The sense of time is something that is necessary for our survival, how we lead our lives is tied to our perception of time. Without it life would be stuck in perpetual limbo, disorienting and devoid of landmarks that mark our lives. But at the same time we all know what is there at the end of the line, at least for us mortal beings. Slowly we march on towards an inevitability a death march while doing our damndest to keep it at bay.
No one really knows when our end of the line may be and some people that do recognize time feels that life is nothing but futility. After all what are we in the grand scheme of things? A speck of minuscule dust that occupies but a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of time in the history of eternity. For us everything happens in a flash, creatures that are so quick to love, so quick to hate, so quick to die.
Much of the normalcy that we enjoy as humans we owe it to illusions. Illusions that sustain our lives and perceptions, that keep us safe in the box so we can make sense of our reality. One such illusion is of time and how we feel it to only go forwards linearly, but the true nature of time exists outside of our measly perception. According to string theory, a theory that attempts to explain the fundamental works of our universe through the means of quantum physics. In this theory there are such things as “strings” a one dimensional object that propagate through space and interact with others. In here it is also introduced on the notion of dimensions, in it we as humans are 3 dimensional beings that inhabit a 4 dimensional space that is time.
In general relativity time and space are not modeled after separate entities but instead they are one and the same. A component that consists of 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, put together it is called spacetime. Basically just as T.S Eliot once wrote “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place” That all our lives we circle in this dimension, this open fabric of spacetime. A specific time and a specific place where we exist and we don’t, tied together by strings that run across dimensions. In our world and in our perception we only process time linearly, we cannot comprehend moving in any direction in time besides forwards. To us spacetime is a sphere, but when viewed from the vantage of a higher dimension, it would look flattened, a flat circle.
In it we would see our cyclical nature, the lives that we lead and would repeat. Nietzsche once introduced the concept of eternal recurrence, where energy in the universe is eternal and can only be reborn in a cyclical nature. According to him the secret fate of all lives is to be reborn in the same life that they’ve always been born into. That all of your experiences, all your love, all your hate, memory, and pain will all be relived eternally as you are reincarnated to the same life. The days where you feel empty and lost, the days where there is so much pain you wish for it to end even if it means dying, and also the days that you felt so happy for you can’t even begin to know why. For Nietzsche the existential dread that spawns from this thought can only be alleviated through amor fati, love of fate to accept that in our existence we shall have to accept, endure, and come to love our hardships like we did as we have already lived countless of times before.
In this flattened view also we could see that time happens simultaneously, we just process it one at a time. The illusion that it is something we cannot see but can only live through is seen as we move about the flat circle that is our spacetime. Our matter and superposition floating about and cycling through the world, time is something that happens everywhere. You are the same you sitting in the chair you are sitting when you were 17 it just so happened in a different time coordinate. A burning house in the future burns at the same time that it is built, an end is already carved as it begins.
So what does this revelation mean for our lives? Does it mean that all this is futile? That we are just going to live over and over, doomed to repeat our mistakes. Does this mean that everything is excused? That we won’t amount to anything in the universe so we might as well do anything we want to. But I think that’s not it, I believe that through this knowledge yes we should be aware of the facts of our existence in the grand scheme of things. But also be mindful of the strings we have, what kind of waves that we want it to ripple across our spacetime. In the paradox of quantum superposition, an entity or substance’s fate can only be discovered after we see that the event has occurred. In an unseen state a substance is considered to exist simultaneously in multiple conditions.
As humans where we are faced with choices everyday, our superposition would be everywhere simultaneously, and there are infinite versions that exists on the choices that we made. This discovery of time for me is not a signal of futility, but rather a reminder to make the “right” actions. After all how can we love our fate, our lives that we would have to live endlessly if we do not strive to make it beautiful. To realize that time is fleeting yet constant at the same time, to try our best even through our inevitable demise, to learn that there is grace in forgiveness, and beauty in our struggles. Connecting through our little strings, not only to our past and future selves, but intertwining with others in a way that we can’t even imagine. Even if we can only see it in one way, time is still always time.
“I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die. Each of us secretly believing we won’t.”-Caden Cotard, Synecdoche New York (2008)
