My lovely friend, lovingmy40s, and I have been engaged in some behind the scenes emailing over the past couple weeks. During that exchange the concept of “time” has come up for examination. So we thought it would be fun to each blog and post some of our thoughts today for wider consideration. I would encourage you to please check out her blog today to see the much more coherent companion piece to what I’ve muddled up below.
Unknowing Time
The snap of the blade when the insect leapt from a tall sharp spike of prairie grass anchored me impossibly in a moment I should not have seen. Driving along the West Texas portion of interstate 40 at 70 miles an hour made the likelihood of seeing any particular blade of grass infinitesimally small; I was tempted to believe I'd imagined the movement on the far side of the road.
Certainly, there was no time to study the field to find the insect or test the environment by sniffing the wind that followed and waved the other grasses in a different direction. But I can still see that motion in my mind's eye.
By the time my brain decoded the sight and I knew how extraordinary it was to have witnessed that nanosecond slice of the panorama before me, it was all past. Past the car and receding miles in the distance. Past my life and gone into history.
Perhaps it was the combination of the moment and my velocity which sharpened my awareness to the razor edge that cut and divided my perceptions into those before and those after the insect's leap into the dark faith of the future. I always think I'm moving forward and though I may not see a long way down the road, but I can at least see the immediate future. My next step, the next curve of the road, or the coming stop. But in that moment I realized all I ever see is the past. I see where the insect was. I see by light that has moved on. By the time I have perceived anything it's gone and I'm left facing a memory.
I delude myself with pity for the poor sad creature who lives in the past, massaging memories of happiness rather than reaching for what is before the present eye. I see that person trapped as surely as the fly in a spider's web vainly twisting but not seeing that the present is accounted very differently from the view of the past that is already gone.
As a student of philosophy and particularly of the existentialists, I am determined to live in the now as though I have some means of knowing what now is. But "now" is the mysterious dark unknown. I can set a trajectory into the future and hope to arrive where my calculations have predicted. In that sense, the future is more certain than the now. Now there is only a blind spot in the mirror where a car may be hiding but I can't see.
No wonder Solon said that no one may know whether he had a happy life until he is dead. The future is visible through eyes of hope and the past through wisdom and experience, but the present? How can you see that which does not exist.
Quantum physics offers me the metaphor for why now is impossible. The famous experiments demonstrating uncertainty show that at any given moment we may know the position of the particle or the speed of the particle, but we cannot simultaneously know both. To have a present is to know both where I am and how I'm moving. But the two are mutually exclusive measures. The past I see, the future I predict, the present I may only guess at.
So driving down along the highway with two bored children in the backseat and a song I've heard a hundred times humming through the headphones, I became intensely aware of the most recent heartbeat, intake of breath, and pulse of blood in my veins. All sensations from the past that I know while I float in the vat of the unknowable now.
Seasonal Affect
I have friends who suffer with Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD. Each winter they withdraw and become depressed. The clouds and cold of winter drive them to an introspective place that presses in and weighs them down. Their prison term ends in Spring when the sun brightens the sky and the warming earth produces new life.
Driving across the country on our Springbreak escape prompted me to wonder if there is a truth these people know that the rest of us miss. Are we all more affected by the season than we are aware? Are our decisions influenced as much by the weather and light as they are by more relevant information?
Spring almost forces a sense of hope. If I turn the next corner, an answer may be waiting. If I breath deeply enough, I'll take on newness and energy for creation. If I walk in the light of the sun, I won't lie awake in the night worried about the monsters of winter. Spring is a time of building and moving before the heat of summer boils my blood down to a slow thick liquid.
I look back a the major decisions of my life and wonder if I'd have made the same choice in a different season. Would I have married, birthed, divorced, bought, sold, written that book ... if the option had presented itself at a different time of year?
It’s an archaic almost anachronistic theme, to everything there is a season. It evokes a time when life was tied to the cycles of planting and harvesting, working and resting. With our climate controlled and homogenized environment, the fundamental connection with land and weather has been all but severed for those of us living in the brave new world of the 21st century. Our greatest point of influence vis-à-vis Nature’s habit is our irritation and inconvenience when snow, ice or hundred degree heat makes our daily commute less comfortable.
But in spite of our attempts to divorce ourselves from the rhythm of the earth, we still experience natural highs and lows that are more tied to the phases of the moon than payday, and more influenced by the amount of sunlight we absorb than to the amount of work we accomplish.
It isn’t that we don’t respond to our world, it’s that we no longer recognize that we are responding to it. I wonder if I were more aware of the relationship between my physical body and my physical environment, would that help me to understand myself and my emotional states? Would I know that the reason I’m euphoric is because of the Springtime electricity preceding a storm? Would I understand that the melancholy is brought on by the excess of pollen I’ve been breathing?
And if we allowed that perhaps we are more at the mercy of Mother Nature than we presume, would we be less likely to seek other explanations and try solutions to things which in the end are not problems but the heartbeat of our planet as it turns on its axis beneath the sun?
Writing this out, I’m reminded that it was very popular some years back to consult the biorhythm chart to see where we were on the various cycles. According to the theory our physical state is on a 23 day cycle, emotional on a 28 day cycle, and our intellectual state on a 33 day cycle. Just for fun, I wrote down how I feel in each of these three areas. I’m tired, feeling like I’ve been wrung out and hung up to dry which I attribute to the recent physical stress of the cross country trip, plus the stress of my life in general. I’m feeling mentally sluggish, which I put down to being tired. But emotionally, I’m feeling peaceful, not too high not too low, which I attribute to the fact that I’ve been getting some really excellent support from my friends. But what if the way I feel isn’t due to anything other than the natural rhythms of my time on the earth?
According to three different biorhythm generators my current state is Physical: -90, Emotional: +90, and Intellectual: -40. Hmmmmmmm - it’s a thought.
) ANYWAY, I've been wondering... So I looked it up. Remember the old Nursery Rhyme? 
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