What is time?

If you feel up to it and are ready to tackle one of the most difficult to understand concepts tied to human consciousness, I recommend that you dig into the written literature and read all about the various definitions of "what is time?"  Go ahead and start with the basic summary contained within the Wikipedia explanation and if after reading it you are still motivated you are most welcome to take it up a notch and continue on with the various scientific, philosophical, and even religious explanations that have been documented throughout history.  A few years back I found myself investing a great deal of my neurons to this subject and am happy to report that I survived the journey in one piece.  The fact that fascinated me the most was that our entire lives are fundamentally based on the mental perception of experiencing our existence through the apparent physical dimensions of space and time, yet we are dumbfounded when faced with our inability to define such a basic concept.  Even though I was able to gain a great deal of insight to the different views that govern mankind's concept of time, in the end I actually found myself divided between my own scientifically prejudiced mind that wants to find a physical relationship between time and the universe around me, and the probability that such a relationship might all be a convenient construct of my mind in order to experience the reality of my existence.  In other words, either I exist inside of time, or I am time in itself.

Don't worry if you don't get it, the truth is that understanding what is time is probably not as important as realizing that what truly matters is that everything that you experience is happening in the present moment.  I live the moment and once it is experienced it instantly becomes part of the past which can only be re-experienced as a memory in the present moment all over again.  The same happens with the future.  Even though I have not experienced a future event in itself, my concern about a potential future event allows it to exist in the present too.  Ironically, the simple minded comment that I so often hear as the cliche "live in the moment" is apparently all that I can actually do.

Then why is it that I am so persistently obsessed about the future?  If I have no ability to exist in any time other than now, why do I compulsively guide my entire life based on ideas or fantasies about tomorrow?  I seem to live mostly within the illusions of how my tomorrow will turn out to be, rather than focus on how my existence is happening right now.  This all seems to me as being a bit counterproductive and wasteful.  Instead, would it not be much more productive if I simply took care of what is going on in my life in the present moment?  I think so.  Why obsess on moments that are not real yet?  Living in the past is almost as wasteful too since it was only real while it was happening, and in the present it is just a memory which I have no ability to modify.  The most I should get out of the past are lessons to guide me in my path to avoid having a painful present.

As a parent I find it most challenging to apply my own advice with respect to living life in the present.  I have found myself constantly extrapolating all of the possible outcomes and consequences to the challenging behaviors that I experience with my children.  "What if" has become more of my reality than "what is," making it a lot harder for me to enjoy the moment.  I can only imagine how frustrating my own conduct must be to those that surround me.  "What if he makes this or that mistake?  What if he doesn't get better?  What if he hurts himself or somebody else?"  Those are all examples of the constant barrage of future queries my mind selects to focus on top of my present reality pushing me away from the actual moment that I am experiencing.  I have learned to accept the past and rarely dwell on it during the present.  However, I am now forcing myself to learn to accept the fact that I am in very little control over the future and that obsessing on negative outcomes is a wasteful use of the present moment.  In fact, if I am to apply this process of trying to live as much as possible in the present, then the choice is actually simple when I inadvertantly find myself spending any time thinking about the future.  It then makes perfect sense to imagine a great future full of positive outcomes and beautiful moments, which in turn then makes my preset much more pleasant and enjoyable.  With this realization I come full circle to discover that I am mostly in control over my own happiness.  If at this juncture I add the benefits of my faith in God, I am now more empowered than ever with the present belief that He has all sorts of beautiful promises working their way into my life during every single moment of my existence.

Dad

"Don't sleep with that window open over your head!"

We've all heard stories from our parents describing why it is that we should not expose ourselves to bad weather without the proper attire to avoid becoming ill.  "Don't walk barefoot around the cold floor of the house...cover your head from the rain...wear a sweater when going in and out of the house at nights...don't stand in front of that fan...take off those wet clothes..." are all among the many bits of wisdom we all tend to ignore in our youth and figure are hocus pocus elderly advice.  All it takes is a one time incident of getting sick after not following their advice to begin to integrate their voodoo wisdom into our own fundamental logic to hand down to our own children.  I for one am not really sure which one of the rules I broke this time that has led me to get bronchitis in one lung and pneumonia in the other, but I am sure that if I trace it back I probably did something I had been warned by my mother a million times not to do in the past.  Today, after a week of a constant fever between 101 and 103, a miserable cough, shortness of breath, and a good amount of pain in my chest, I find myself pondering how not breaking one of the dozens of rules that I was taught as a child could of saved me from all this misery.  See, even as an adult I still manage to not listen to what's good for me!

The story goes that my great grandparents after migrating from the Spanish Canary Islands had acquired a great deal of land in the beautiful island of Puerto Rico.  In those days it was customary for brothers and sisters to own adjacent properties, and with large size families this meant hundreds of acres needed to be crossed before you could leave a family name behind in order to cross the boundaries of other islanders that were not related to you.  Most of the wealth was measured on how much land and animals you owned and very little value was given to cash at hand.  When the need for money became real, the sale of land was the typical outcome to solve the shortage.  Times were tough and owning land to cultivate or raise animals was a major source of income that typically separated social classes, plus it had the added benefit of being able to feed your own family too.  There was no electricity, plumbing was non-existent forcing the young and able to make multiple daily trips to water wells, and sanitation was all about outhouses at the time.  In those days, becoming ill was an ordeal of great magnitude to contend with since hospitals were not in abundance and it was all about having to make arrangements for a doctor to come to your home on horse to treat whomever was ill.  Medical supplies were scarce and treatments were extremely costly.  Dysentery, tuberculosis, and pneumonia were the three major culprits in life expectancy being so low for the families of those times.  My maternal great grandmother caught pneumonia and every effort was made to heal her and bring her back to health.  Land was sold to pay for medical attention and her medications and just a few weeks after fully recovering, one night she stepped up to close an open window so the rain would not come inside their home, and this single exposure to the inclement weather caused a relapse on her recovery provoking a double pneumonia that lead to her eventual death shortly after.

This is just one of the tales from my mother's side of the family that instantly changed the behavior of every single descendant from there on to never approach an open window during the night without making sure adequate clothing was worn for such a trivial task.  It stuck and it made an impact so deep in my family tree that I can guarantee that at least up to my branch, every descendant has been properly briefed on the correct protocol of window closing during the night when it's raining.  This all sounds simple enough, yet I know as well as you do that our family culture is a great influence in not just our belief system, but also some of the most trivial decisions we make day to day.  The way we greet our elders asking for their blessings, the pause we make before answering simple questions while our brains evaluate the most adequate response for the occassion, even the level of eye contact that we project when casually conversing with other people are all part of our heritage.  The truth is that I believe that very little is truly random and that the majority of our day to day interactions and behavior are a sweet mix of our culture, family values, and inherited personalities.  Tone of voice, volume, expressive demeanor are just a few of those traits that can probably be traced back through our family tree.  Yet is it not also true that each one of us are so very different from our brothers and sisters too?  Some quiet and shy, others loud, expressive and outspoken.  Beautiful, is it not, the apparently random texture that covers our children and also the common river of our genes that run deep inside them?

Most of all I like being aware of all of this that I write about above.  It warms my heart when I am able to remember the tales of my ancestors in order for me to pass them down to my own kids.  It humbles me when I get sick after doing something dumb like sleeping with the window open above my head during a cold night, even though I must of heard my parents warn me so many times to not do this when I was a child.  It amazes me when I hear a friend tell me how much alike my oldest son looks like me, even though when I peek at his pictures I am freaked out not to be able to see the resemblance myself.  All of these things force me into a quiet contemplation of trying to figure out "why" this is all so, but I eventually discover that the real answer behind it all is a beauitful thing called "life."

Dad