Time
I have heard it said that we all have something to say, and we spend our
lives saying it in various ways. You notice it if you read more than one
book by the same author. No matter what different titles their books may
have, or story lines or themes, you can still pick up the scent, as it were,
of the same person.
My personal theme song (at least one of them) just happens to be Time. I
carped on it in my first two books, The One Thing, and
Tao, An Enduring Ancient Wisdom.
What I go on about so much is really quite simple: time does not exist.
It is merely a word.
Although ... I'm not so sure if I should say, merely a word. In
all honesty, there is really nothing mere about the word "time"
and all its relatives, what I call time words. Our language seems
to be filled with them, and we use them constantly. They are all so simple,
like before, and after, and when. Can you even
imagine a language without such words?
But, as I suggested in the introduction to Tao, the mere existence
of a word does not necessarily mean that the thing it refers to is real.
Words, you see, are pointers. They point to things. But we sometimes get
confused with the word and the thing itself, and need to be reminded occasionally
that the word is not the thing it is pointing to. The words on the menu
are not the actual food. The word steak is not the thing you eat.
The word east on a road sign is not the direction itself. This
is so obvious that it may seem silly to even mention it.
It is not so silly though, when you apply it to abstractions, things you
cannot see, or sense in any way. The word time for example is pointing
to something, but what? What exactly is it pointing to? Have you ever seen
time? The question is absurd, yet, at the same time, compelling.
Like so many other things in life (religion for example), time is one of
those things that is handed to us by the society we happen to be living
in. Most of us simply take that which was given to us and hold on to it.
Some of us, the weird ones, do not embrace that which was given
to us.
I happen to be one of the latter. I have not held on to that which was bequeathed
to me. From one point of view, it makes me look not only weird, but downright
ungrateful. But the things that have been given to me, like religion and
time, are not money. They are mere ideas, abstractions, things
you can never know about for sure, things you always have to simply believe
in, one way or the other. And believing can be a total burden.
Personally, I don't want to believe, unless it's in really cool stuff, like
certain kinds of fantasies, like that I might live forever and become fabulously
wealthy and other fantasies that I won't mention. Other than that, you can
have your beliefs. I find them quite burdensome. I'll take the cold hard
cash any day.
I use time. I use it like I might use the lines on the map, lines
which, like time, do not really exist, but are nonetheless very useful for
getting around, what you might call, maneuvering.
The downside about not believing in time consists in not believing in time
travel, which happens to be one of my favorite science fiction
genres. The ability to travel in time has to be one of the coolest
things imaginable. But (I'm very sorry to say) it is not really
possible.
All traveling, you see, is through a medium, like water, or air,
or empty space. In order to be able to travel through time, it
would have to exist as such a medium. Last time I checked, time wasn't any
such thing. It was only a word that we used to describe a feeling
we experienced when we did something, like waited in line to be seated at
a restaurant, or waited to become an adult so we could drink or smoke, or
waited for the next paycheck to waste on whatever.
June 13, 2005