Let's Get Metaphysical, Physical!

You have to belt that out to the '80s gem from Olivia Newton-John. Let us pause a moment and silently praise the ON-J, for appearing both in Grease and Xanadu. Amen.

Rather than write the usual sex and love ramblings, topics on which I verge on the obsessive, I'd like to try and articulate some thoughts I've been having on time. Namely, how we interpret time as a linear phenomenon. (Disclosure: I'm a half-assed intellectual, so don't expect any revelatory thesis to be explained clearly. I'll likely dead-end, stop and start a few times as I explore this topic.)

This topic came up several days ago with my most faithful conversationalist on abstract topics, CBC Radio 1. The program 'Ideas' had interviews with two physicists from Oxford on the notion of space-time. I admit much of what was said went above and beyond my head, as I can only understand complex ideas through metaphor.

Usually when time as a concept is articulated, the metaphor of a river is used. Time is described as a continual flow, starting at the headwaters of the past and stretching into the horizon of the future. The present is like the river we are standing in, the waters swirling around our legs and pulling us with unseen hands in one direction or the other. Always changing, never stopping.

This image, like all metaphor, is how we make sense of things we can't see. As it makes sense, I've always accepted it and thought the experiences I've had with time that differ were just anomalies. Now I'm not so sure.

One of the Oxford professors posited that instead of a river, we should imagine time as a landscape. I like this image very much. When we take in a landscape, we see the entire vista, right to the corners of our peripheral vision. There can be several seconds where we just take it all in, before our focus narrows onto one object or feature. This tendency to focus has evolved as self-preservation. Our early ancestors would not have lived long wandering around the savannah dreamily taking in the gestalt while a lioness crept up behind.

Time as a landscape. First off, where are the intersections between the past and present and future? They are not clearly demarcated. We may artificially create boundaries to give ourselves definition, plant a border of flowers here to indicate now, clear a patch of scrub over there and name it the past. But unless we are rigorous in our maintenance (and who has the time?), nature starts to take it over again, and the lines become blurred.

Next, how do we explain that all of us have experienced time shift? It may be when we've been exceptionally tired or stoned, or that may just be when we notice it most. It occurs in small ways and we call it coincidence; it occurs in repetition and we call it deja vu. If we imagine time laid out not as a single track, but as parallel ones that at times intersect, at times diverge out of sight, then I think these phenomena begin to make sense.

While we may feel we exist in an understanding of ourselves here now (go ahead, pinch yourself and proclaim yourself Present) it may be that we also simultaneously exist as ourselves in the past and future. Imagine an infinite number of yourself, at all stages of life and dying, all chugging along the time track thinking This Is It, Life. Then think about them multiplied by the number of choices they could make in every moment, and how it splits them further, veering each one onto a different course. It boggles the mind.

Last weekend I had the experience of time convergence. My past from 20 years ago (almost to the day) entangled with the present in a number of odd small ways over the course of two days. I could physically sense the collision between the past and present, much like room temperature or hunger or pleasure. It was a very strange sensation, and a constant tug-of-war between my rational, primitive brain and my sensory perception. It's disconcerting and curious, Alice in Wonderland. It left me physically off-balance, coincidentally. I needed to rest a couple of days afterwards, even missing one of my beloved workouts.

So why ramble on about this topic, without the benefit of a story of white rabbits and red queens? Why think about this at all, when the sensations can be unsettling. Some of you mothers may be impatiently shaking your heads, "Who has the time to think about time? Get to the sex and the humour, get to the goods."

Well, I think it's a sticky topic. Both perplexing and reassuring. As someone who is trying to take action these days without necessarily seeing the outcome, someone who has been terrified of making mistakes and who has been hard on herself for failure, it's comforting to think I'm not alone. An infinite number of possibilities stretch on either side of me, and I don't have control over when we may overlap each other. One decision doesn't necessarily obviate the other outcomes or possibilities.

As put in the Robert Graves poem I posted a while back: I'm in a new understanding of my confusion. Trippy.

I'm stoner-talking but sober. I know.

In other news, I think I have a date tonight. Yes, a real date with an unknown person, not a tryst with an old, maddening friend or a international conference seduction. Just a plain old let's get to know one another, try it out date. I'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
Ms. Rutte