Let’s talk about time.

I’m ner­vous about start­ing my job because it’s new & dif­fer­ent & I haven’t built up pat­terns yet, so I don’t have a pre-existent habit for how to deal with the things that will get thrown at me.

Time is a com­pli­cated sub­ject, that I really could spend a great deal of time talk­ing about. For instance, it’s sub­jec­tive to your per­sonal expe­ri­ence. As we get older we per­ceive time as speed­ing up (on a ratio of 1:1 when we’re 25? & 1:1:1 at 80-this is from my mem­ory, it might not be totally accu­rate, but near enough). We lit­er­ally expe­ri­ence time as get­ting faster. & then there’s things like nar­cotics & intox­i­cants & cases of trauma that slow down & speed up time,

See­ing is also LITERALLY look­ing back­wards in time, we think we see some­one talk­ing & hear some­one at the same time, but it isn’t true-it’s just a con­nec­tion our brains make. & there’s the mind blow­ing fact we look back­wards into space, stars that we see may have already died & we can take pic­tures of THE BIG BANG. The first known moments of the uni­verse, we can SEE THAT!

Ein­stein the­o­rized that time & space are the same thing, which may or may not be true. In quan­tum the­ory, time is a prob­lem –but you can make the equa­tions work by either tak­ing time or space out– so we don’t really know what time is.

But if time & space, are in fact, as Ein­stein thought, one big space­time fab­ric, then if all of space exists at once, then all of time exists all at once too. This means lin­ear time is non exis­tent. Every­thing has always hap­pened, is always hap­pen­ing, & has already hap­pened. This could explain intu­ition, those hunches of what might hap­pen in the future, because the future exists already.

I like this thought (but I also dig a lot of other time the­o­ries too) for one it means that every moment is the now (duh), but that you don’t have to worry about some­thing never hap­pen­ing again because it exists simul­ta­ne­ously. It also relieves the anx­i­ety I am feel­ing towards this change in my life. If it already happened/is hap­pen­ing, then I’ve done it, I’m there already, there’s noth­ing to worry about. I’m not mov­ing for­ward in time-I’m just uncov­er­ing it.

It also means I’m already done with this job. I’m already work­ing full time on my site. I’m already 60 & doing what­ever I’ll be doing at 60 & I’m simul­ta­ne­ously 16 & in high­school & that is kinda shitty, but ulti­mately that’s ok too, because I’m already dead & born again & con­tin­u­ously born in this life, & I’m already 4 & at Dis­ney World with my par­ents the sum­mer before kinder­garten starts, & I’m already 25 sit­ting at my com­puter con­tem­plat­ing time.

So there’s noth­ing to worry about if time exists all at once. We’re not mov­ing for­ward or back­wards or side­ways or what­ever. Like explor­ers, dis­cov­er­ing Amer­ica (& real­iz­ing that it existed all along & was in fact, already dis­cov­ered), we dis­cover the future.
Maybe this isn’t true though. Maybe time doesn’t exist at all, or time only exists in other dimen­sions & seeps into this one, or only exists in our minds, or time & space are two sep­a­rate events, but I think the time­space fab­ric fits nicely with the philoso­phies of east­ern thought.

Alan Watts explains it as look­ing through a crack in a fence & there’s a cat, but you can’t see the whole cat, just a tiny hole sized, chopped up amount of cat, a frac­tion. So you see the tail of the cat go by & the body & then the head, & you might think it’s 3 sep­a­rate really weird look­ing ani­mals, but it’s really just one cat-split up because of the fence crack. Time is the cat, events hap­pen all at once, but because we’re just lim­ited human beings & our brains can’t process that much infor­ma­tion, we neatly split time into a lin­ear line/ a crack in the fence view of time. This fur­ther strength­ens the Every­thing Is Con­nected thought/ since every­thing is a piece of spacetime

So that’s kinda worth think­ing about.

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• Incog­nito & prac­ti­cal evolution
• Para­dox: Or How I Believe in Noth­ing and Everything
• How to be an Outlaw
• Prin­ci­ples of Art: Steal from your­self (aka, every­thing is an artists tool)
• The ulti­mately sim­ple 2 step guide to choos­ing what you believe in.