The Great Terminus

The other day a thought occurred to me: what if we are always experiencing all moments, throughout the entirety of time, at once. It's not a new idea, but the other day, it felt truer than it ever had before.

Have you ever walked down a particular street and felt it was of another time? Perhaps the houses were painted in soft pastels, slightly faded and faintly out of place, distinctly indistinct; the presence of aged architecture or a vintage streetlight, a baroque column, an odd sign. Or maybe you've seen a person that looked of a different time; an old frigid looking woman with a Victorian primness; a savage looking hairy man with the forehead of a Neanderthal; a child wearing monochrome corduroys, suspenders and a coal-colored hat, straight out of Depression-era America.

Maybe you've passed a playground and felt time bristling at your skin, spinning back around like a merry-go-round, reminding you of a memory you once had but had forgotten; of a certain time of day; a perfume your grandmother wore when you were a child; the temperature of the air when you had your first kiss.

Or the way time is able to saturate itself in song; Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, The Temptations, Lead Belly, Hank Williams. How a song can grab at you and summon the memory of a person, place or thing.

The idea of time as circular isn't a new one either , in fact, it's one that's been repeated many times over, in many different places, at many different times. If we agree that we can do away with the linear notion of time (a leap, perhaps) and bend it in on itself, events would flow like electricity through a coil. Maybe then, the reason we have memories of times past is because they're still happening, now. Not only times past, but also, times that haven't yet passed.

What if your desires, those things you peer into the future and seek out, are just memories drifting toward you from the future? They are your cravings and yearnings, sometimes concrete, and sometimes fuzzy, but perhaps always just remembrances of things to come. There is a German word sehnsucht, which I think describes this sentiment:

"It is sometimes felt as a longing for a far-off country, but not a particular earthly land which we can identify. Furthermore there is something in the experience which suggests this far-off country is very familiar and indicative of what we might otherwise call "home". In this sense it is a type of nostalgia, in the original sense of that word. At other times it may seem as a longing for a someone or even a something. But the majority of people who experience it are not conscious of what or who the longed for object may be, and the longing is of such profundity and intensity that the subject may immediately be only aware of the emotion itself and not cognizant that there is a something longed for."

When I think of time as circular, I don't even think we traverse the circle linearly. Each moment is its own discrete but related circle, and kind of vibrates and pulses upward into another circle, and another circle, like a ripple, or a magnetic field.

There are the naysayers, though. Those that would tell you time is linear, that it starts with the big bang and ends with the eventual heat death of the universe. Let's consider the character of such a person for a moment, and ad hominem attack the shit out of them. Because, really, these people are a miserable loveless lot and should be dispensed with. If life is the sum of a person's subjective interpretations and ruminations of the things they perceive, and the ideas they have about the things they perceive, then all anyone ever has is their beliefs - they are what guide us, what shapes us. They become the voice in your head, the way you view yourself, others, the world. Why, then, would you want to believe in the obliteration of everything you love and hold dear; the great terminus.

Why would you insist upon this truth and thrust it like a sword at those who would disagree, those with their own beliefs on time and life, on death. They are the ones who assert themselves like one telling ghost stories, like someone trying to scare children. Personally, I think it comes from a place of fear somewhere deep inside them. A fear they will doggedly project onto any dissenting opinion, accusing others of being too afraid to accept the truth - their truth, the one they've subscribed to. They are the ones who believe in a zero sum game, where there are no winners, just losers. Really? This is what you want the voice in your head to say? These are the dreams you want it to whisper to you in the dark when you lay your head against the pillow? I've noticed they are usually the ones who, at night, cannot sleep.

Remember, even the number zero is a circle.