The Infinite Hourglass – Time is a Hoax

“Time does not exist. Clocks exist.”

“Time” is the most commonly used noun in the english language, but if you start looking into the “reality” of time you’ll find a galaxy of speculation, theory and rejection of this most basic of common sense experiences.

Many notable physicists, spiritual teachers (and my cat) hold that time doesn’t exist – or is at least very different from our popular understanding of it. Einstein thought time was a persistent illusion within a singular existence, a concept already familiar to buddhists the world over. More recently, these pesky quantum theorists just love to demonstrate how quickly time fails at small scales, pointing out quantum entanglements and a host of other complications.

So how can so many of our real-life challenges stem from the perceived possession, use and loss of something that is so unreliably defined and that may not exist at all?

Last night I talked to my friend Kyle for the first time in nearly 5 months and he said “when we talk it’s like no time has passed at all.”  I saw an image in my head of an hourglass flowing both directions at once – an infinity symbol standing up to remind me that our most precious commodity might not be something we can possess, use or lose at all.

So, as long as we are chasing the white rabbit and his shiny gold pocket watch down the rabbit hole… here are some of my favorite thoughts on the subject of TIME:

Personal Relatimeity

Remember how long time felt when you were a kid? How each school year and summer seemed like a lifetime and some afternoons seemed to last forever? Well, when you were 7 years old waiting for the ring of a school bell to set you free… a 70 year old was out there waiting for Matlock to start. Even though it was the “same” 10 minutes, you had to wait 10 times longer relative to that old coot.

We know that time seems to speed up as we get older (half of adult conversation is on this topic with liberal use of the word “crazy”) –   but it was Guy Murchie in his fantastic book that first pointed me toward the idea of “telescopic time.”  Essentially, as you get older, each unit of time (seconds, hours, days, months, years) decreases in relation to your total experience.

This weekend my daughter turned one. One year is 100% of her life.  That same year was 1/34th of my life, so each day that passes is 34 times slower to her and faster to me! Relatively speaking, each passing second is shorter than the last!

Fortunately, we all have 100% of our lives, all the time. So if we feel like we are running forward too fast, maybe we can slow down and turn our attention in a different direction…

Back to the Future!

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“You have your whole future ahead of you, leave the past behind.”

Our cultural common sense tells us to visualize life as a timeline where we move forward into the future with the past behind us. Unfortunately, because we can’t see the future every step we take is into a dark fog where anything can be lurking. Moving forward into the future is a bit like playing pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded on a tightrope… unable to see what’s ahead of or behind you.

It may surprise you to learn there are a lot of other cultures with their “backs to the future.” That is, they are facing the other direction with the past in front of them and the future flowing in from behind.

This actually makes a lot of sense, because if you’re facing the past you actually have something to look at. There may be fog in the distance, but it’s a landscape both familiar and interesting. A little model city full of items to sort, study and rearrange. With this orientation, it’s the future that’s behind us… forever pouring new experiences into our view to mingle and relate with a past that’s always been there.

As weird as it may feel initially, if you experiment with mentally turning around on your personal timeline with your back to the future you may notice some interesting things happen. Your eyes seem to be flooded with light as you turn away from an unknowable void and instead see your life in all its glowing context. The present becomes interwoven in a landscape in which you’ve always been playing. If you’ve spent your whole life “moving into the future” it may seem unsettling to go into that void rump-first… but with your back to the future that motion seems to slow down or even stop, like you are a still observer present in your life with newness gifted to you moment by moment.

“You have your whole life in front of you, so let the future flow in!”

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It’s all wrapped in a present

Much has been said about the power of the present… and if you are lucky enough to find yourself unwrapping it from time to time, you may discover how much power we have over time, reality and “the meaning of our lives.”

Isn’t it interesting how we always have the power to create the future and re-interpret the past? Those long summers of childhood and fleeting weeks of crazy activity all collapse into this one experience you are having right now    *    and all these mysterious fragments become the whole of what you are.

So maybe we don’t need to worry so much about the amount of time we have and whether it’s wasted or savored. This is your present, and time is just a four letter word.

Further down the rabbit hole:

This article (like many others) – began as an uncomplication rabbit-hole audio recording, which you can listen to now… if you have the time…

Wear it: