The Illusion of Time

Sometimes there are those days that fly by and you wonder where the day has gone. Then there are the times you look at your children and wonder how they got so big. You start thinking about it and then realize you are almost 31, but you still remember catching frogs in the pond behind your house as a kid like it was yesterday. However, one day while lounging on the beach, it seems like it has been 2:30 for hours as time seems to crawl by in extreme slow motion. Then your almost five year old daughter exclaims that she was little so, so long ago, like before she got this new skirt, which was the day before, and your almost three year old thinks everything that has already happened…was yesterday.

Time.

Our concept of time.

Clocks. Schedules. Deadlines. Measuring. Limits. Dates. Appointments. Stopping. Starting. Opening. Closing. Anticipation. Seasons. Tempo. Goals. Memory…. A lifetime.

I often get very caught up thinking about time, what it means to me, and how I can capture it and put it on my side. It is very interesting how the same thing…time…can show itself to you in so many different ways and conditions. It is the same thing… time… yet it feels so different when you think about it in relativity to one particular event or concept. How is that? How can a child be so free from the ties that time seems to hold, yet as adults we are under so much pressure from it. We worry that we are growing older and miss the memories from the past, we worry that we might not be doing what we should be doing right now, and we worry that we might forget something that we are supposed to remember to do sometime in the future.

The past is only a memory…thoughts held somewhere in our conscience. Thoughts about how you remember an event and what you remember feeling then. Yet it is not something you can see now. It is only a memory.

The future is just a bunch of thoughts about what might be, but there is no concrete assurance that that is the way it will be. It is only a thought. The future will be how it is when you get there.

The present is RIGHT NOW.

It is happening right in front of your eyes. This is the only reality there is. Right now, what you can see, what you feel, what you hear, taste, and smell…this is our present reality. For all you know, nothing outside of that exists… it is only a thought or memory. The house next door is only a memory, until you walk up the stairs, look out the window, and actually place it in your sense of reality. Until then it is just an image stored away in your mind from the past. The more I think about it, the more I realize that by living fully in the present moment, truely is a present to yourself. By worrying about anything other than what is going on right in front of your eyes, is just worrying about a thought, one that you cannot truely prove exists, other than your thought that it does.

The past has helped the future be what it has become, the present is what it is, and the future will be impacted by the past…which by then our present will be the past. As we know, history repeats itself, so I think this means we have already lived the future before.

Something to think about…