The Moment You Know

Time is a funny construct.

It is so obvious.

So powerful.

So self-evident.

But from a purely human perspective, it seems entirely abstract. In so many ways, we cannot experience time.

Yes, we get older. Every moment. We have a past. That past has varying degrees of impact and control over each of us. But I'm not sure that is the same as time. After all, we carry our worst, most frightening experiences with an immediate clarity, attuned to every detail even when it may have happened years ago. But many of us won't recall what we ate for lunch three days ago.

Great joys have a similar, timeless impact on us. Thankfully.

People who "live" in their pasts, who keep those memories unusually alive, vibrant and current, can suffer tremendously. At times it leads to mental breakdown and illness. Because as human beings, we cannot live in the past. It's physically impossible, and mentally and emotionally fraught with risk and danger.

That yesterday person, choice, indulgence, event or victory is gone. It can be remembered, but it cannot be lived again. Experienced again. It cannot be acted on, nor changed. That fragrant breeze, once felt, cannot blow again.

While the past can be remembered - sometimes accurately, sometimes not - we do not exist there. We are not there. We blinked, and it's now gone. It exists only in the complicated chemical soup inside our heads - remembered and prioritized not by when it happened, but what emotions we have tied to the memory. And no two people will remember the same event in exactly the same way. It may forever change my life, while you remember it like lunch three days ago.

The past can be a powerfully terrible prison, or a forgiving and seductive avoidance of life.

But, aside from death, no matter what happened - earth shattering, heart rending, devastating, elevating, joyful, hope filled, or affirming - "blink."

And the next moment came.

Is here.

And "blink."

Is gone.

It didn't come any slower from that joyful moment, nor any faster from the pain.

Blink.

As a human being time only exists on the clock. Our non-linear, emotive narrative of the select highs and lows of our past doesn't count time.

I remember being a boy in that Lake like it was yesterday. Trust me, it wasn't.

Blink.

But there are two pieces to time, right? If the past is subjective, and time only a construct, what is our future? We plan for it. Prepare. Schedule. Commit to it. Manage it. Eat right, and cut down on the cigars for it. Pray for it. Desperately pray for it. Imagine the shit out of it. Madly thrust our blind hopes and dreams into it.

When.

After.

If.

Then.

Only in the future.

Only after now.

But never now.

Blink until your eyes dry out and you can't focus. The past may expand and grow, but the future sill won't be here. Won't be now. In a very real, physics-based, science-defined way, it does not exist yet.

And it never will.

We can't live there either. Physically, we actually can't. And physic-ly too.

How is it that we surrender so much of our lives and emotions to two places we cannot exist in? Two places, where no matter how hard we try, we cannot love in? While the past may cage us, expectations of the future can crush us emotionally too. It can lead to an Alice-in-Wonderland-I'm late-I'm late-I'm late-White Rabbit-with-an-iPhone-existence.

Never blinking, and never seeing ourselves, or those around us as anything more than a list of what we will be, who they could be, how they will be so wonderful after, how I will finally ... be.

And even if in some Star-Trek-steam-punk-infused-alternate-quantum-reality we get to that future.

"Blink."

And the next moment will come.

And "blink."

It's gone.