Beyond the Bounds of Time
Be old, be young; bounce around a bit.
The other day, during the heaviest portion of Spokane’s first snowfall, I took a walk with my dog. Flurries were swirling, visibility was minimal; a full white out. The dog’s fur went from black to snow-clad white in mere moments. I held my tongue out to catch flakes, I threw snowballs at Oliver as he barked and grinned, running circles around me. It felt the way a first snowfall can feel — full of magic and joy.
Uh oh, here goes time, swirling! ……………….
Years ago, I am in the backyard as snow falls. Playing hockey with my older brother and the neighbors. The tennis ball we use as a puck goes over the fence and I run around into the scary neighbors yard to retrieve it. Pausing as I pick it up, I look up at the unending descent of white from above and hold my tongue out, out of instinct, and catch the flakes that fall.
………………………………………..
Years ahead. Where I am, I don’t know. This is only the possible… but I gingerly walk, more delicate on my feet now. But still, hopefully always, holding out my tongue to catch the flakes that fall. As the young descendent beside me does the same.
I encouraged a friend recently to run toward their inner-child wonderment in all the ways they can. The thought bubbled up amidst a discussion we were having around curiosity, and letting a reality reveal itself to you rather than prescript meaning onto it.
My childlike time in the snow was bookended by Excel spreadsheets and Teams calls. Activities a 29 year old might be expected to be participating in during a weekday. The contrast between the two is stark and there exists in me a tendency to want to paint the snow play and the spreadsheet on a continuum with one being good, the other, bad.
But continuums are often excuses I use to not recognize the inherent worthiness tied to all the parts of a spectrum. This time around, Flow, Spirit, Openness; whatever name; sparked a different way to process through these different parts of my day and pieces along that continuum... and I arrived at a simple thesis:
Don’t act your age. At least not all the time.
Why is it that the only time I’m 29 is when I’m 29? Why can’t I try being 58 when I’m 23? Why not spend some time with 4 year old me when I’m 62?
Time is manipulable. The higher elevation you are, the faster time moves. We’ve actually measured this with atomic clocks. The lower, the slower. Light from stars is how they existed thousands upon thousands of years ago. The stars in our night sky, as we perceive them, are acting vastly younger than they are. There are islands that have formed in the Pacific as recently as this year from volcanic activity. NEW ISLANDS! They look a lot older than they really are. Stoic rock on water.
Growing up, play was so much about encountering and attempting to embody a different perspective not bound by the linearity of time. Whether that was acting as an animal, playing different roles in a game of house, being your sports hero in a backyard hockey game, a princess, a knight, a dragon; whatever. But then, somewhere along the timeline, age becomes the parameter and lens through which we filter our actions and determine our participation with the world.
When out on your next walk, how does 13 year old you experience it? How about 72 year old you?
I have been taken by notions of time lately. I’ve realized so much of my curiosity is funneled through a lens of how the different moments I have lived create the reality I occupy. Butterfly effect type stuff.
We are webbed to these moments and decisions. And that web extends outward, too. To places and memory and reality that is yet to be built. How does it all flow together? What is this map of a life? How would I represent it as a landscape? These are questions I don’t know if I can know the answer to, but they do invite more than just 29 year old me to be curious.
You and I and all of us actually have a whole choir of selves within the self to engage the world with. Not just the character of this age and time.
The following quote is from physicist Carlo Rovelli found in his book, The Order of Time.
Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother's caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I've written, what I've heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word "memory" into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
- Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
The play we are invited to, as we grow in our awareness of the complex web we and reality are made from, is a playing with time itself. Acknowledging our present place within it — the Excel spreadsheet, the Teams calls — but then, and here is the fun, occasionally allowing ourselves to slip out of that momentary costume time wears and travel elsewhere. Go on a walk with 7 year old you. Listen to a song with 82 year old you. Imagine a life years ahead, slip back into the perception of years before.
We don’t have to have our life simply be when our life is. The present you is made of the previous and the possible, and letting each come out and interact with the present is not a disservice to it, but a recognition of the swirl, myth and miracle that now even is.
……………………..
I spend a lot of time with 8 year old Mike(y) walking the parameter of a pond that was situated to the west of a family cabin. He’s looking for frogs and weary of the snake known to live off to the side in the reeds. He’s looking down the ridge the deciduous forest descends, seeing doe and fawn. I am there now by being there then. It all continues and loops back. It is all here to stay.
We are allowed to stretch beyond parcel and place and see ourselves in imaginative ways that do not prescribe, but cast a wide net of possibility.