Time is a strange commodity.
Our watches tell us it’s ticking away at a standard rate and that it’s a constant, although anyone familiar with physics knows this is wrong, and it’s just a construct to keep us all in place at our shitty jobs.
Incidentally, I just heard today that in an experiment involving neutrinos at the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the speed of light was observed to have been surpassed. If true, the implications for physics, and our entire understanding of the universe may have to be radically altered…
But back to time.
Do you ever feel that time is so ephemeral and so speedy that you are hardly able to grasp a hold of events as they shoot past?
I feel like this when I’m on holiday, which lends a strange otherworldly air to the whole experience.
Let me explain a bit more.
Normally we don’t really notice the passage of time in our daily humdrum routine existences. We know we’re fatter than we were a year ago, and with less hair, and we aren’t earning as much money, perhaps, but on a day to day level we can’t easily detect change and can get a handle on things because there is an illusion of stability.
But in a way, nothing exists. I don’t mean this as a pessimistic manifestation of existentialist angst, but think about it.
The past has gone, and is just a ghostly memory which will fade, and the future hasn’t happened yet, and so doesn’t exist.
That leaves us with now. This is the only point at which we are experiencing things directly, the only point which is ‘real.’
But if you go deeper, you find that this point of real life is minuscule. If you try to pair it down with a temporal scalpel, you could say that one second ago is the past, and the next second will be the future, leaving a tiny window of now. But you could keep paring this down infinitely until you find that there is in fact no ‘now‘ at all, just the intersection between two unreal states. That’s quite a disturbing thought, isn’t it?
In our normal lives this kind of thing doesn’t matter, because what we did last week pretty much resembles what we’re doing this week, and chances are it will be virtually the same as what we get up to next week.
So there’s an illusion of stability and permanence brought about by the repetitiveness of everyday life, which dulls our awareness of the march of time and the ephemeral nature of all things.
On holiday it’s different, though…
It’s been eleven days since I returned from a three-week trip to France and Portugal.
Now I’m locked into a kind a stasis in which I go to bed at 4:30am, get up at noon, go and hang out in a cafe for a few hours, go back home, listen to some music, cook, watch DVDs, process photos, read books – everyday precisely the same routine, a lethargic torpor partly caused by extended jet-lag but also a desire to try to prolong this stretch of time before the horror of going to work starts again.
When I was in Europe, however, I was experiencing new things every day, changing my location frequently, meeting new people, and the whole thing shot past at a velocity which seemed so high that it was hard to keep a hold of anything.
I took to jotting down the events of each day in a little notebook, because if I didn’t, I had the feeling that they might vanish, leaving no trace of their existence.
Sometimes this feeling of temporal velocity and my inability to construct a wide enough ‘now‘ upon which to build a stable vantage point led me feel that the events passing before my eyes were not real, and actually appeared somehow ‘thin‘ and distant.
I felt like an observer watching someone else’s film at high speed, that my connection to the surroundings, the people and events was so tenuous that I couldn’t tether myself to them sufficiently to make them real.
And indeed, in recent years when I return home from extended trips I always feel as if I had never actually left, and only my photos prove that I was really there (and the enormous hole in my bank account, of course).
It’s for this very reason that I deliberately try to force myself to enjoy every new vista in quiet contemplation before picking up the camera.
So many people on holiday are snapping away that paradoxically, their very attempts to preserve the moment actual heighten their inability to connect with and experience it in any real sense, adding to the feeling of its unreality and ephemeralness.
How sad then, that it is the mundane repetitiveness of everyday life that keeps us grounded and lends our lives a sense of stability in a sea of constant flux, rather than the spontaneous adventures into new territories which are gone in the blinking of an eyelid, leaving faint traces of a fantastic ‘otherness‘ to be chased after in daydreams like a rare butterfly, always just out of reach…
‘Prolonging the Now‘ – well, that sounds like a great song title to me, but it’s also something to strive for in making the most of life.
Just as a Buddhist acolyte seeks to transform his insights into a permanent state of satori, so should we be looking how to deepen our connectedness with reality in order to heighten experience.
However, it has just occurred to me that some people might argue that it is precisely those repetitive rituals of daily life that should be cherished and enjoyed since they are the only realities. ‘The more you travel, the less you see‘ kind of thing.
As Hitchcock might say (Robyn, not Alfred), these are all very much late September kind of thoughts….
