Dear reader from the future,
I just watched Tron: Ares last night. Two computer programs faced off—Ares and Athena—and their exchange struck a chord in me. “You’re out of time.” “And you’re out of lives.” The words hung and popped out from the screen, and I found myself thinking: what’s the difference? When we run out of time, aren’t we also running out of the one life we have?
How many times have we really felt we are out of time? Perhaps we feel this way because we haven’t paid much attention to the passage of time.
Time and change are connected. Rovelli writes that “for everything that moves, time passes more slowly.” I used to think this was just something about relativity and speed. But lately, I’ve been feeling it differently. With two more months before the year ends, this year feels impossibly long. Not in the exhausting way, but in the full way. The kind of long that comes from actually paying attention.
With two more months before the year ends, I can really say this year has been a long year. And I wouldn’t be able to say so, had I not paid attention to everything I have done, if I hadn’t written down notes and summaries of how I spent the last ten months.
Rovelli also writes that “everything in the world becomes blurred when seen close up.” Maybe that’s why we lose track of time when we’re living day-to-day, caught in the immediacy of the now. But probably, when we step back and see this year—really see it—then the months might sharpen into focus. And then I thought, maybe the reason why I was moved when Athena said, “And you’re out of lives,” is because we only have one. At least one life in the now (because the afterlife is another whole conversation).
Looking back at my notes from The Order of Time, I found this passage again:
And we begin to see that we are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come. The clearing that is opened in this way, by memory and by anticipation, is time: a source of anguish sometimes, but in the end a tremendous gift. A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time—in our finite time—to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment.
We are time. Our memories, our anticipation of what’s coming, the way we hold onto moments—this is what time actually is for us. Reading this, I feel both the weight and the gift of it. The anguish of finite time, yes. But also the miracle. Each moment now matters more when I notice how they accumulate into a life.
Your letter writer from the past,
Jessa
jessa 