At the end of time...

Time is not linear in the sense of an everflowing stream that we emerge into in the moment of our birth and then disappear from when we die. Time is an illusion that we have created in our often desperate attempt to make sense of our existence. Like up and down and the other arbitrary directions we use to share the physical plane with other self aware beings time is a referenced between here and there. Where we were - where we are - and where we may be.

Our need for time can be rationalized in many ways but essentially it seems to me at that it is our awareness of our mortality that underpins our obsession with time. Human beings are really only separated from the our fellow creatures but the knowledge that we will die. We know our lives must end and the measure of our lives is framed by this imaginary model of the dimension we call time.

Now please do not conclude that I am trying to argue that time itself does not exist. No - but our generally feeble understanding of time is one that is limited by our frame of reference. We understand time through our senses and the experience of time always occurs in the moment of being. Time only is now. Everything else is merely a cloudy memory of the past or an even less clear vision of the future. Nothing is as it is perceived simply because each moment is filled with more sensory information than we can take in and process. We cannot remember enough to have total recall of what has been. We can barely process all that is happening now. Any desire to know the future is a fool's dream that simply robs us of the one place we will ever be - here and now.

This reflection on time comes as I prepare to leave Victoria. I have floated free of time here - sleeping, rising, eating when it seemed the thing to do. I did have to schedule things with friends - had to step back into the world of conscious time - but mostly I have lived in the moment for the past three weeks. Now I will return to the world of time as imagined by most people in my cultural milieu. Classes resume next week. Soon I will be slave to the clock again. I resent it but accept the necessity.