No time for Time by Atul Singh

For the longest time I have held this notion that life visits us in moments, in tiny specks of time, laid out sequentially, as is evident from the passing seconds and minutes on our digital watches, or the tick tick clicking away and moving of the second and minute hands on the wall clock that validate that view. Perhaps it was not our view ever, it was a view trained into us on the sly by these instruments of convenience.

It seemed like a fair one to have, up until  this afternoon when sitting in a middle school concert with young musicians playing on the stage a new view emerged. Upon dwelling, this new view seems closer to the truth, and even prettier than the earlier one. But you be the judge. 

The alternate view is that life plays itself out in countless notes, all simultaneously playing out, creating the music of life, as we know it. Each note is distinct, some are shrill and others dulcet. Some are loud and others soft. But they are all, millions and millions of them, simultaneously playing out, forming the symphony of our lives. There is no separate thing as Time. These notes and their interplay is Time.There is no beauty outside of these notes. There is no past or future. It is just this cosmic symphony that is. Rest is just the limitation of our mind trying to make sense of it. Let me use an example to possibly illustrate.

It is late afternoon. You are doing your office work. There is a knock on the door. You open the door and it is your daughter, who has come back from school. You see her beautiful face, it is a pretty note. You see in the background a tree in full spring bloom in your front yard, another note plays itself. You realize for the umpteenth time that you have to replace the doorbell, yet another note. The office report needs to be finished for the review is a shrill one. She needs to be fed before her riding lesson later in the day, another note. So all of this happened not sequentially, but simultaneously in your awareness zone and are the threads weaving the true fabric of your life, along with a million other such notes, defining, nay crafting what we call each moment. If we go from the mundane to the fantastic, yet another hundreds of thousands of thoughts/actions playing out and diffusing into each other. The sunlight or rain, the stock market, the change in government, the melting glacier somewhere the storm that exist somewhere promising to soak your area soon enough. The pay raise, the hunger pang due missed lunch, all of this happening all at once, defining our life. Where is time then? Really there is no time for Time. 

Time, the one from the traditional view, now seems like a lazy bystander, instead of the awe-inspiring orchestrator of everything consequential and inconsequential about life. It isn’t a sentry any more to everything that transpires. It isn’t the lone orifice through which everything must flow. Everything that is, is, in-spite of time. We just use time as a facility to snapshot a view to compare our and the next persons view to understand each other. Each snapshot itself an intricate web of billions of threads interwoven, or billions of streams of events flowing through our conciousness as if, only because we are there to experience them. They would be there anyway, even if we weren’t there, albeit with one less thread, us, in them. So the whole Universe just is, in all its eventualities, not flowing from past to present to future, but just just spread out over trillions of paths, of events and eventualities, of notes, that are playing into each other, like a big giant Orchestra. 

Life indeed is not playing to the tune of Time. Life just is, and we are sitting in the audience hearing the Orchestra and amongst the players plaing our notes, simultaneously. 

All the rest of it is just our fantasy. May be.