time

I saw a gif the other day that was a three second clip of an idyllic American surfer-beach from the 1970s. Lots of people with questionable hairstyles walked about and a girl played on roller-skates, not much else. It’s strange to think what technology has done to our perception of time, photographs and recordings in particular. This was an un-choreographed moment, no film crew, no real purpose, just a bunch of people hanging round the beach catching the sun. There’s no way to identify them, many might be dead, others old and wrinkled. They won’t remember this day. But here it is: recorded and replay-able forever, at least this narrow perspective of it. And it made me think that no moment in time is really “over”. Those people are still living out that moment, just in that time. At 3:58pm on July 21^st 1978, or whatever the hell date it was. They are experiencing it then, like I am experiencing time right now. All living things share time, no one bends time to fit around them, instead everyone is given one piece of the jigsaw.

Buddhists, and everyone practicing “mindfulness”, speak of living only in the present moment. They teach that everything is temporary; all things change and pass. The present moment is the only thing we can have without using our imagination. In this sense, time, in the way we commonly speak about it, is constructed: we create narratives and stories of our past but these are made up too because they only exist in our heads. Everyone has longed for the past, looked at a photograph from years before and felt an ache through their whole body wishing they were in that photograph now. I’ve had many such moments. But there’s no reason to feel this because that moment doesn’t exist. That moment was the present moment, now you looking into the photograph is the present moment. They are really the same moment, you are just experiencing them differently. 

The roman poet Ovid wrote “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit”. This is usually translated as “Everything changes, nothing perishes”. Writer Neil Gaiman translated it as “Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost”. I love both translations. I first found them during a period when time scared me. The relentless push forward, the sheer unbiased nature of it all, filling me with dread. These words helped me. They make the point that we don’t experience things to remember them we experience them to experience them.