has the most amazing way of slipping by. Grains of sand on an infinite beach, constantly washing away moment by moment. The moments themselves are so small, they don't exist, you know? They're just moments, single, tiny things. But they're all we have.
Some people say that someday, time will start to rewind, snapping back like a rubber band, or a ball thrown into the air, until the universe recollapses in on itself and we'll have what Douglas Adams called a gnab gib. Then time will start moving forward again, big bang, gravity, fusion, heat, life.
Life will then ponder the existence of time.
Over and over and over again.
This is all from an outside perspective, of course. From our perspective, time has already snapped back an infinite number of times, sure as it has once. Yes, we are accepting this theory as true for the moment. This doesn't seem like such a problem, except when you consider the question of free will, that eternal goal of humanity. In my opinion, free will is bullshit. It's a fancy way of saying we don't know what's going to happen next. It's an excuse for being unable to change the past. See, the timeline already exists, your life is laid out before you, determined by a near-infinite number of factors jumbled together in the most complex equation in the universe. Indeed, it's the only equation in the universe. Abstractly, that equation is the universe. The outcome? It determines what you'll have for breakfast tomorrow.
To us, Benjamin Franklin has no free will. He can't decide, all of the sudden, to become and actor's apprentice instead of a printer's apprentice. It can't happen, because we already know what he did. Likewise, we will have no freewill to those in the future, because they will know what we did. We don't, though, and that makes all the difference; the discovery, the journey of life that only sounds corny because no one stops to think about what it means.
This is true whether or not the time-rolls-back-and-forth theory is accurate.
But enough about the future, let's move on to the past. A fixed world, a dead world, a world that, for whatever reason, humans want to preserve at all costs. The funny thing is, how do we know it exists? How do we know it's anything but a story our subconscious came up with on the fly to explain your present situation?
We don't. But, whereas we refer to the future as free, we refer to the past as set. Oh, sure, you can interpret history any way you like, but no one disputes solid fact. At least, no one reasonable. That's because once you start disputing it, suddenly there is no truth anymore, only perception. There are very few people who can live on perception alone. I know I'm not one of them. Some people dispute, and then turn to an alternate 'truth' because they can't live without at least something. How do you know that the world isn't 9000 years old, that it wasn't created in seven days by a being we then went and killed? How do you know it wasn't sneezed from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, or congealed from a drop of oil from the spear of an inbred demigod hero? We don't. And yet, we don't have 'free will' to believe the past. We have facts. We have a nice little reasonable worldview that we hide in because we don't want to know what might be out there. It's the human condition, hiding in a cave, watching shadows because shadows have no power to hurt. We separate past from future because its the only way that makes sense to live. And the crazy part is, we're the only species that does it. Sure, you can train dogs, you might say that that indicates that they have some sense of past, but it's not true. It's just a matter of chemical bonds in their brain; they could care less if they were trained, or had been born knowing to roll over when the big thing spins its fingers.
You ever see a pet on antidepressants? A bird taking therapy, or a lizard reading philosophy? No, of course not. They're too busy surviving. They're totally and fully occupied with the present. We humans, though, we broadened our vision; we chose to look past the present and now, the present is mainly empty; we live most of our lives in either the past or the future, focusing on what we believe to have happened and what we believe might happen. The result is that we can build machines, harness fire and electricity, play with life itself. The cost? Possibly the sanity of every single human being on the face of the planet.
Cheer up, though; it's not so bad. And if it gets you down, just remember that this is all we have. It may seem pointless, but when the point itself doesn't exist, when there is nothing more out there, nothing more than the next moment, the next word, the next line, the next day, the next class, the next shift, the next job, the next child, the next generation, the next flare of life on this wonderful planet, well. When that's all there is, what you do with it makes all the difference in the universe.
This started out as a sort of lament, an epitaph for something I did in my past that I can't change. I suppose the fact that you can't change the past is obvious, but to me it wasn't. From there, this came out, the idea that the past and the future aren't so different. This combined with two other theories of mine, that free will is bullshit and that maybe my memories are just a subconscious explanation for where I am right now, and you get this thing. The funny part is, it made me feel much better about myself, knowing that there's a story beyond what I may or may not have done, and that there's no use dwelling on the past. The intention was to do the same for you, though, knowing me, this will just end up sounding extremely depressing and drive the larger part of the Albuquerque area into a homicidal nihilist rage.
New short story soon. Candles, chicks, and cult rituals.
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