Live in the present. Be here now. Are you paying attention? Probably not, most of us are either thinking about the past or dreaming about the future. So, the interstitial space between gets past over like an old dog in a pound. Recollection is impossible, because there’s no recorded data in the moment. It’s as if it never existed.
Einstein’s theory of relativity placed all time past, present, and future in one space. Richard Feynman proposed time was a sum of histories, basically a story with a sequence with infinite possible directions – oscillating paths, backwards, or squiggly swirls. It didn’t have to be linear. Stephen Hawking’s and Hartle saw time as having no boundaries.
Regardless of theory, our clock sets a boundary we’re trained like Pavlov’s dogs to follow. According to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), there are 86,400 seconds in a day. That’s a lot of time if you are really present for it all. 50% of our sleep time is spent dreaming in REM. The other 50% is well, I imagine dancing somewhere between Einstein, Feynman, Hawking’s, and Hartle’s notions of time. Then we have what about 16 more hours. What to do, what to do?
Just like everything in our existence there’s a lot of waste. Inattentive passage of precious time we only lament after it’s gone. However, if the brain could “summon” the power it attains in a tragedy, not only would every second be accounted for, those seconds would be split and divided into infinite calibrations of extra time: expanded time.
Think about a moment that was probably the worst time of your life. I was nine months and two weeks pregnant. My husband at the time had brought me to the hospital to have an outpatient procedure that was supposed to put me into labor. But something was very wrong. They couldn’t find my baby’s heartbeat. I was no longer dreaming about my baby’s first cry, or reminiscing about when my husband proposed to me. I was shocked into the now. I was never more present, ever in my life, than in that moment.
To this day, I can recall every minute detail of that time. What book my husband was reading, the blood draining from his face when he looked up from it, Chet Baker singing from a boom box, the wrinkles of worry in my doctor’s facial expression, the medicinal metallic smell of the operating room, the scratchy texture of the sheets, and most of all the blue-skinned cry of my son -followed by the terror of responsibility building with vigilante zeal inside me, knowing I had to keep him safe from harm from now on. It was a hyper-conscious reality. I will never forget it.
I’m not proposing we recreate tragedy. I am wondering how we could recreate the suspension and subsequent expansion of time that happens in difficult moments. I think for starters, if we mentally slow everything so far down that in essence we could actually see the infinitality of time [think Keanu Reeves in the hallway when the bullet comes toward him in the Matrix] we would find much more fulfillment. Yes, it would take A LOT of practice. But it seems so worth it. Not only would we be getting closer to experiencing time as all the great scientists were able to envision it. Nothing would be wasted. Our attention would be so focused, we would all make much better choices -and who knows where the sum of our histories could take us in a boundless universe.
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