One of the best things to come out of the last two years is that my senses of time and space have got very slippery. I used to be confident about where I had been and when I had done things. But I look at images of New York or Hong Kong or Sydney and think “Was I really ever there?” Even London, which I know like the back of my hand, has become “as of a dream”.
And as for time. I look at photos of the kids when they were little and it’s as if those people still exist now, but are different from the adults that visit our house. The intervening years, and sense of progression, has gone.
My true experience of both time and place is always here and now. It can’t be anything else. The linear narrative of my life that my brain constructs is made up. It doesn’t exist. It never did.
Realising this is disconcerting but freeing.
This.
I think of it as the realisation that, as each year passes, it becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of our lives. In essence we are getting older more and more slowly until, one moment, the whole duration and expanse of life is available to us immediately. And at that moment we cease to get any older.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about synchronicity and asynchronicity in the context of time and place. Much has been made of ‘instant’ communication when it rarely needs to be, or should be. ‘Instant’ rarely serves me well.
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But then sometimes intuitive reactions are closer to the truth than intellectualised ones.
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Yes, that can definitely be true, especially if there’s grog involved 🙂
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