As you might have guessed it, today I feel quite philosophical, and that’s why I had to insert the word QUITE without needing to. Today I want to talk about time. Now, what the hell is time? One sunrise and one sunset make a day. One day is 24 hours. If we keep dissecting each unit I promise you I won’t be alive when it’s over, because it’s infinite. Once we take a chunk of time and keep zooming in to smaller units, we will never reach a point where we find the smallest time fragment, because there’s always a smaller one. 

Now let’s zoom out to one day. We said that a day is 24 hours and it represents sunrise and sunset. But the sun is always rising at one side of the planet and it’s been the case for 4.5 billion years. 

I don’t want to get into the year rabbit hole. Minutes and seconds are confusing enough. So from our egocentric definition, each individual has his or her own time depending on where you are on the globe. So what’s 1 o’clock for you can’t be exactly one o’clock for me unless we both occupy the same spot at that moment. What part of your body is considered you? 

Let’s assume you said it’s your head. Well in this case, if you’re facing north, there will be a time difference between your shoulder and your right shoulder. And what part of your head are you? So if you noticed, the moment we try to compartmentalize one aspect of life, we fall into these infinite rabbit holes. Time is a made-up concept to help us organize our lives, but it’s not a real thing. Life is dynamic and can only be grasped as is. No chunking and splitting. Science uses arbitrary measurements like meters and cms to help us have consistent measurements, but the universe doesn’t give a dam about minutes or hours meters or cms. 

And any event in the world can only be described in the present continuous tense. As Alan Watts said, if you see a candle flame, you shouldn’t say there’s a flame, but rather there’s flaming because it’s not a static picture. It’s alive and dynamic and changing all the time. And if you see a fist, you should not call it a fist. You should call it FISTING, because what if I open my hand? Where did the first go? We have to pinpoint the moment in time at which the cause took place, which begs the question: What level of magnification is small enough to be identified as a moment? This brings us back to the dilemma of identifying the smallest time unit (the bit of time) that’s considered a moment. The second trap, assuming you successfully found that smallest time block that represents a moment, where do we draw the line that separates the cause from the effect? I’ll give you an example by asking a question When we look at a 5 years old kid, when did that kid become alive? I’m sure it’s before they turned 2. Is it at birth? Trying to see the world as causes and effects are like me giving you goggles that only allows you to see half an inch square of what’s in front of you, then I let a dog pass from left to your right so slowly and close enough that’s almost gonna touch you, then ask you to identify what you’re looking at. The first day you’ll see the head, then neck, shoulders, trunk, legs, tail. We look at the world as causes and effects for the sake of simplicity, but there’s no such thing as a cause and effect. Nothing can be identified as an individual thing without falling for infinite traps. The moment we try to identify one thing, we fall for a huge trap.  Many Buddist monks said to the effect of “if you can say it, then you don’t understand it”

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