At ten years old I was obsessed by the concept of time. I remember my one and only graffiti, on a train going to NYC, where I wrote: Time is God.
When we talk of the human condition, we are often referring to our mortality, and that is part of it. But the role time plays in our lives is much broader than that. There are many strange things about life on Earth, and none stranger than living in the limits of a unidirectional timeframe.
We are bounded by a body that must exist in the time/space continuum in only one location--here and now. But we share the planet with billions of other humans and uncounted trillions of other living beings. Time, as we experience it, is parsed into moments. Moment to moment, every one of those beings is experiencing something.
Many millions may be having generally the same experience as you are. But millions of others are experiencing many different things. Some are in a sort of hell. Others are blissful. Most may be somewhat neutral.
But is is all happening right now and right now and right now. All at the same time. It is simple, but also somehow too large to hold in my limited brain.
I am sure I need to work on this concept. My delivery is still clumsy, though I first wrote about this 40 years ago. And it may SEEM obvious, but if so, we constantly forget it. Forget where we are. On a strange planet in and even stranger universe.
I don't think that the existence and effect of time can be disputed. But its MEANING certainly can. One is objective--seconds ticking by. Birth. A life lived. Death. But how that translates into personal experience is subjective. Time may be linear, but how it experienced is not.
The ancients felt time as circular. We still celebrate the circle of the year. And many worldly philosophers have seen history as spiralic. By which they mean that history may repeat broad strokes but not exact circumstances. As is write this I am trying to set clearly in my mind the objective elements to better understand my subjective adaptation to the world. As are we all.