Anachronology

Time’s a funny thing. On the one hand it’s almost subjective - it flies when we’re having fun, it drag when we’re not. And yet it’s a measurable, quantifiable entity. Seconds tick by, months and years and decades seem impossibly forever, and, yeah, everyone wants to argue about whether or not we’re now in the “twenties” - spoiler: we are.

Carl Sagan made a lot of discussion about time, helping us comprehend is as the fourth dimension; length, width, height and time. The reason why we do not understand this fourth dimension is because we exist firmly locked within the first three - we cannot perceive this additional dimension other than by crafting a 3-dimensional “shadow” of 4th dimensional objects. For an example of this, we can take a straight line (one dimension - a length), make it into a square by extending its endpoints by equally long lines along 90 degree angles into a second dimension of width, and then extend that into a cube by extending its endpoints again to their 90 degree third dimension. A three dimensional object - like this cube - can be somewhat expressed in two dimensions - it can be drawn by truncating the third dimension extensions, or, if you had a clear cube held above a piece of paper, you can draw its shadow to achieve the same effect.

Now here’s where it gets wild. You can represent the “shadow” of a fourth dimensional object - a cube with an additional (fourth) dimension is called a tesseract - but when shown in three dimensions, it looks like a cube within a larger cube, with their associated corners connected by shorter lines.

Anyway, now that I’ve bent your brain a little, let me share an observation I’ve made about time recently. As we just passed through the great annual calendar replacement, everyone’s thinking about resolutions, reviewing what the previous year’s accomplishments are, etc. And at the same time, we are considering Big Moves, Big Accomplishments, whether it be weight loss, alcohol consumption, book publishing, or whatever floats your respective boats.

And somewhere along the line, these goals either run away from us, or scare us into submission, and we end up ending the year feeling a bit disappointed in ourselves. It just so often feels like we just don’t have the time - and the world tells us to solve this by making the time, but honestly that’s always seemed far too simple an answer to me. Time can be fun for us, it can be our friend and not be our enemy.

So my personal goal has been, sure, to have those big goals, and to more or less derive a strategy for getting there, but accepting that things are gonna change along the way. It’s like how I write my books. I start with the ending and know how I want things to resolve, and then I figure out where the starting point is, and then I develop a casual framework that tells me who is the focus of what chapter, where they are in their quest for their ultimate goals, and so forth. That’s the outline, but it isn’t the story. I don’t always know the story until I’m slogging through my first drafts. The characters make choices I didn’t consider, and suddenly we’re off on a tangent. Sometimes those tangents are awesome and make the story so much more interesting than I’d originally planned, and sometimes it gets trimmed out and put into a collection of short stories. But it always informs my as to the journey of the characters themselves.

And you know what? Life is like that, too.

Sometimes the things we thought were so important have to sit on the back burner and simmer a bit longer, and sometimes things jump in and take center stage. In the end, it’s just how life is, and we rarely get to control many of the experiences with which we are confronted. But that’s why it’s exciting. That’s what makes life such a grand adventure.

From the perspective of time, because we are travelling through it, its as if we exist within the threads of a great tapestry, and from where we stand, we only see the threads that surround us. The goal would be to rise higher and see the entire pattern, but that is the vision for another day, after all.

For now, we dance among the seconds and minutes, viewing the film frame by frame until we can understand the entire presentation. Whether we can guess how it ends or simply be thrilled with the show, it’s the journeys we all face.

So pick a second. Ponder a moment. Find joy in those single frames of life, and glean what love we can whenever the chance befalls us. Those are the moments worth living for, and which carry us on to the next one.

Or as my kindergarten teacher used to say, “hold hands everyone, lets go have ourselves an adventure!”