Much about time is mysterious, and there are clues that time perhaps does not work as we think it does. Perhaps past, present, and future are all ever present in some fashion quantum physics hints at, but as of yet, this is not a reality we experience. Our experience is one of moving forward, of proceeding in a linear fashion through minutes, days, years, and decades. Yesterday may exist somewhere, and our past selves with it, and we remember them, but for now, there is no indication we will ever encounter those experiences exactly as they were lived (me hitting a little league home run as a ten year old). For all practical purposes, yesterday is over, gone, having left the instant it arrived. We cannot hold time in our hands; nows are perpetual, and perpetually lost.
Time’s passage leaves a residue, a marking of our spirits, the events we’ve lived through and acted upon forming our self’s shape, our –ness wet with what has gone before. Each now is a new opportunity, an invitation, a moment of possibility on which the Past seeks to intrude, foisting its evidence (for good or ill) on the mind. The Past’s evidence may be good and true, but the Present allows a genuine opportunity for new choice, a new way of being, if there’s enough courage, and enough grace.
But where once we had decades, we may now have only years. And one day, life as we understand it now will cease or transform, and the new thing, the thing beyond our current understanding of time, will arrive.
Use time well, for in our current, experienced reality, it doesn’t come back.
JEFF BERRYMAN 