It may seem futile to pull at the frills of our understanding of time and expect it to unravel. Decoding a clockface and feeling the passing of time is understood at a young age and rarely revisited. Why would it? It’s one of the only things we can be sure of — existence is predicated on the past and like a nearing left turn, the future is arriving shortly. However, let’s put this idea to the test. I challenge you to examine your experience to see if there is (or isn’t) validity to this understanding of time.
Back to the Future
Let’s begin by investigating the past. When searching for what we call the past, what do we find? The past can only take form as a constellation of thoughts and feelings while still occurring — in a word — now. The now as we come to see it, is impossible to escape. No struggle or rationalizing can place us in the now, for everything occurring is the now. It is simply not possible to experience anything but the precise moment of now. Any recollection or image of past events is occurring in the now in which it is being recalled. There simply is nothing else. Don’t take my word for it, search deeply into your own experience. Bring to mind a recent memory. It could be the moments before beginning this essay or the moments before this sentence. No matter how recent, the experience you experienced when experiencing this memory is nowhere to be found. This applies to our concept of the future as well. Attempting to predict the future will still be taking place in the precise now of our speculation. In other words, the events we are postulating exist in a hypothetical future. But the postulating itself is still happening now. The effort spent trying to simulate a potential future won’t bring us any closer to it.