By John Hanley
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23 Feb, 2020
Time is a mysterious phenomenon. It's not a thing. It's not an it. For humans we experience life from within the backdrop of certain death. Each now moment is imbued with resonance and poignancy because of our awareness of our eventual demise. We know that eventually our life on earth will expire and our earthly possibilities will cease to be. We know what's coming, even if we don't know precisely when. Do other life forms have this relationship with time? Perhaps other primates, to a degree. Dolphins, whales? Perhaps. What would happen with humans if life were infinite in duration? Would we be much different beings? I suppose the Greeks called such beings "gods," though they didn't really have the imagination to portray the gods as anything more than typical humans. If the Greeks did grapple with the deep effects of being immortal, I suspect they would have imagined more disinterested, detached behavior, rather than the pettiness, jealousies, and overall egoism of the Olympians as we know them. Then again, detached Buddha-like beings wouldn't have been much fun, nor very interesting characters in epic poems. For us, perhaps time seems linear -- from past to present to future -- because we feel the march of time toward the inevitable end (at least on earth in life as we know it). Most of us feel understandable fear of the end that awaits us, with the fear perhaps turning to terror as we get closer to the end of the line. What would happen if we were somehow unafraid of death? What would that do to our experience of time and, therefore, life? Instead of an inexorable march toward the finish line of the race that we never want to reach, what if we prepared ourselves to leave our bodies, so to speak, with equanimity and affirmation? What if we actually mentally and emotionally prepared ourselves to be able to make our grand exit with blissful acceptance? It would take courage to confront the facts of life in this way, rather than mentally and emotionally running away from it all the time. Perhaps, though, to a profound degree, our experience of time (and life) from moment to moment will be powerfully impacted by the posture we take toward our eventual death. I wouldn't be the first and I won't be the last to suggest such a proposal. Something to think about at any rate. Thanks for coming along on this brief exploration of time or, at least, one major aspect of time.