Arrive early and you miss the chance for a grand entrance. Arrive late and you might miss the party altogether. When timing seems to be everything, could it be that time is nothing at all?
TIME OUT
My brother has a grandmother clock. It’s pendulum swings, but doesn’t go anywhere – just back and forth, if he remembers to wind it. The list of things that cycle is like a cycle itself, endless. The earth rounds the sun as the moon rounds the earth. Racecar drivers, horses and dogs compete on oval tracks. The seasons repeat while diurnal rhythms regulate the lives of most earthly residents. Nocturnal rhythms take care of the rest. There are bicycles and washing machine cycles, and life cycles. Most of these cycles take us to where we started, so we are left to wonder, are we really going anywhere?
We scurry about, but our journeys through physical distance are neutralized or cancelled, if not by cycles, then by the limits of our earthly playground. In essence, like the random Brownian motion described by Robert Brown in 1828, we just vibrate. But the earth and the solar system that we are a part of – indeed, the galaxy itself is traveling through space to somewhere, right? Well, sort of. We are expanding, like the rest of the universe, and accelerating – going ever faster towards . . . nothing???
Not exactly; there is dark matter after all. In fact that’s most of what there is and it suggests that the universe itself exists through a never ending cycle of its own, like a giant soap bubble that gets bigger and bigger until it suffers the Big Pop! Then, the Big Pop gets followed by another Big Bang and we’re off on another round.
Have you heard, “It’s lonely at the top.”? I wouldn’t know, but if you were the universe, you would. Being everything means you stand right next to nothing. So, there is no distance for the universe. It can’t go anywhere – no place to go means there are no miles per hour used to get there. The universe is out of time. Yesterdays and tomorrows help us to keep our thoughts organized, but there are no sunrises or sunsets for the universe. Ultimately, the universe has no history at all. It just is. Just being means that you can’t un-be and if you could un-be, how would you ever be able to think about being in the first place. Remember, this only applies to the universe as a whole. We human beings are free to imagine whatever we want.
One of the things we use to shape our imaginings is “Cause and Effect”. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Knowing that helps us to write a better story, a better history of how we got here and where we are going. But it’s still mostly fiction. Unless we can build a rocket that is lightyears ahead of our current technology, we are stuck with just being here in the IS. And, if it’s predestination that’s hitched to your star, you can always take solace in the fact that we are Homo sapiens, otherwise known as Human Beings.