TIME

No, not the newsmagazine, the way things keep changing, and how they never change back. The "inexorable march of" thing, if it is a thing. the direction of which is defined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Is it an illusion? Certainly we experience events in time, but to an objective observer (God?) are all events at any point in time just as real? Is it only from the way we experience events that they seem to happen in sequence? Why can't we go back (or forward) to experience events out of sequence? Will we be able to go back and/or forth when we understand the nature of time better? Why hasn't anyone come back to experience us yet? Or maybe they have? Is antimatter just matter going backwards? It looks that way in a Feynman diagram.

Living in the present (how can you avoid it?) does it really avoid the other times? Does the present moment include all three times (and if so are there nine times? the past, present and future in the past, the same three times in the present, and again in the future?) or does it exclude them? If the present, which so quickly becomes the past, is real, is not the past which it becomes just as real? Or is the present even real? If existence in time is not real, what is? Is there existence outside of time? If it is outside of the space-time continuum that we call the universe (i.e. all that exists) can we call it "existence" at all? How can we divide the present from the future and the past, when the future seems to slide as seemlessly into the present as the present does into the past? "Carpe Diem" sounds nice, but by the time we seize the day it disappears and becomes yesterday. Non-abiding is all we can do, and we must accept it.

Speaking of the space-time continuum, I wonder if there are other universes in which movement in time is free, but movement in a spatial dimension is constant, inexorable and unidirectional, as with what we experience as time in this universe. Would that spatial dimension become the functional equivalent of time? Is that what "time" in our dimension constitutes? From the outside, if there is an outside, is time another spatial dimension? What would the universe, experienced differently, "look" like? What does it look like experienced from outside of time, (assuming that there is an experience of that perspective)?

But why speculate about this? It is typically human to wonder about things we can never know. We humans think ourselves blessed by this faculty, and hope to have answers some day. Maybe instead of being blessed we are cursed with this, and will never know answers. I don't know. I only know that I have questions, but not their answers, and that there are worse things than speculating about these things. Maybe they are what life is all about, just questions, never any answers.