The Untimely Death of Time

Synchronicity: On the day after I post about my thoughts on time, the author of A Brief History of Time dies.

Irony: Stephen Hawking dies on Pi Day, no less.

Coincidence: Pi Day is also Albert Einstein's birthday (March 14, 1879).

Relativity: Hawking was born Jan. 8, 1942, 300 years to the day after the death of Galileo.

Yes, Stephen Hawking was born on the anniversary of Galileo's death, and died on Pi Day, the anniversary of Einstein's birth.  

I think I've covered this before, but I dislike the statement, "Life is short."  Your life, in fact, is the longest thing you'll ever experience, the longest thing you'll ever know.  Nothing, to you, will ever be longer than your life.  Intellectually, you might be able to conceptualize how long a century is, but until you've lived for 100 years, it will just be your imagination, a concept of an actual century but not the experience of an honest-to-gosh century.  And even if you do live to be 100, you still won't really know how long a century is, because a lot of your understanding will be based on memory, that most unreliable of narrators.  In the here and now, trying to grasp any long span of time is really just a combination of imagination, fantasy, and memory.   

Yes, time is in us, and yet somehow we keep continuously proceeding from this instantaneous "now" to the next instantaneous "now," nanosecond by nanosecond.  You can say that there's time, with a lower-case "t," that we actually experience, and then there's upper-case-T Time that's really only the eternal "now" yet somehow keeps refreshing itself, like celluloid frames in an animation.

So how do we resolve this apparent conflict between the lower-case-time within us and capital-T Time?  Zen Master Dogen once used the analogy of a person in a boat on a lake.  On the one hand, the person moves the boat by pushing along the lake bottom with a pole, and on the other hand, the boat is moving the person.  The person's moving the boat and the boat is moving the person.  So it is with us: our minds create the illusion of "time" out of memory and imagination to explain the sequence of an infinite number of instantaneous "nows," but on the other hand those instantaneous "nows" keep coming, one after the other, whether we conceptualize it or not.  

Maybe I'm not explaining this well.  Maybe I don't understand it and don't know what I'm talking about.  Maybe I wrote this in the past, even though it feels like "now" to me, and maybe you're reading this in the future, although it seems like "now" to you.  Maybe all I'm trying to say is that time is relative.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.” - Stephen Hawkins (1942-2018, RIP)