Friday, July 28, 2006
"If I said I'd been sitting here for about 10 minutes, you'd say I was wrong."
My mother was sitting on the toilet. I was standing in the door of the bathroom leaning against the frame.
"No. I'd agree with you," I said.
"But, earlier you said that I was wrong about being in Mt. Vernon (Iowa; where she went to college) not too long ago."
"No, I said that the way I understand it, it's been 64 years since you've been in Mt. Vernon, since you graduated college in 1942, and you left soon after that. I also said that you're perceiving time differently, now, than me. I'd even go so far as to say that you're making time differently than me, now. Or, maybe, sometimes, you're not making it, anymore. Instead, you've graduated to the point where you can walk in and out of the factory whenever you feel like it. So, we're both right, within our separate contexts. Since I'm experiencing time as strictly linear, to me it's been 64 years since you were in Mt. Vernon. Before I was born. For you, though, with your expanded experience of time, when you woke up this evening it had been only, what, a year or so since you'd been there?"
"Oh, I'd say, a couple of years."
"Okay."
"I still say, something's not right."
"Well, what's not right is that you and I are in different time zones, now."
"But, if you and I agree that I've been sitting here for 10 minutes, then we're not in different time zones."
"Oh, yeah, you're right. I guess what it is, then, is that I'm still only in one time zone, the linear one that we all agree on shortly after we're born. You, though, are not only able to be in linear time, you can also can also experience time in different ways, and you can escape it, if you want. What I refer to as the past or present, which I still believe I cannot experience at the same 'time'," I stabbed mock quotes in the air with my fingers, "you have the ability to experience simultaneously."
"What about the future?"
"Well, I don't know. Can you also experience the future in the present?"
She thought about this for a moment. "No, I don't think so."
"Maybe," I suggested, "that's still to come."
Mom awoke about forty-five minutes previous to the above conversation. As is fairly usual, now, when she awoke she wanted to know if I'd, "heard anything about [her younger maternal uncle] and [her maternal grandfather]."
First I reviewed the death dates, contrasting those with where she and I are in linear time, now, 2006. Then I said, "You must have been visiting Mt. Vernon while you were sleeping."
"No, she'd said, "but I was there not too long ago, and so were Grandpa and [younger maternal uncle], so I know they can't be dead."
This paradox was troubling her more than usual yesterday evening, so, I decided, maybe this time we should talk it out while I attempt to explain her expanded conception of time versus my own severely restricted conception of it.
There's a reason I felt nominally qualified to try this. Some years ago when living in Seattle I had what I suppose most people would consider an hallucinatory experience while I was driving to work one morning. Sitting at a frontage road stoplight, just previous to merging onto West Marginal Way, I shifted, without warning or premonition, to my side and watched myself manufacture time. I saw the "stuff" which we mold into time enter me at a downward angle, as though it was coming from "the sky", through my back, rearrange itself inside me, exit through my front and lay itself down before me path-like. No, I wasn't on drugs. At that time I didn't even take vitamin supplements. I hadn't altered my normal morning routine that day. The only related aspect of my life was that I'd been spending some months in deep thought, punctuated maybe once a week with deep discussion with a friend and considerably more often with deep reading of and listening to others from both spiritual and scientific perspectives, about what I can only describe as various life mysteries. One of those mysteries had not been the mystery of time. I had, though, been considering, for some years, the concept of systems, along with the idea that the system within which we live, while tightly knit, isn't the only system existent and, most likely, not the only one available to us. The revelation I had about the nature of time was a surprise but not, in retrospect, incomprehensible in context. Since I'd been a young teen I'd wrestled with my memory of time moving much more slowly when I was a good 10 years younger than it did "in the present". Instead of assuming this was a quirky and altogether incorrect perception, I'd approached it from the possibility that time does, indeed "move more slowly" for the young and quickens its pace as we age. Maybe, I considered, we exist out of time before we are born then learn how to make time once we are born, in order to bond with our species. The more facile we become at making time in accordance with the society we keep, the faster time moves for us.
Since I've been living with my mother it has occurred to me that, at some point, we make time so fast that some of us shoot out of time and begin experiencing our lives as of a piece rather than in pieces. So, I figured, even though I continue to exist in linear time, maybe I have enough of an "understanding" of time and no-time that I can help my mother make sense of what seem to her like troubling disparities.
"Try this, Mom, and see how it works for you," I'd said earlier, when she'd tried to insist that I was saying she was wrong about what she was remembering and I was telling her, "No, you're not wrong, we're just in different time zones, Mom. Consider all the moments of your life ingredients you've decided to use to bake a cake. Each ingredient is separate before you begin. They look different from one another, taste different, occupy different spaces. You mix them up, bake them, and when you pull the cake out, cut a slice and eat it, the ingredients that an hour ago you would have had to eat separately and at different times, you can now eat all at once. Does that help?"
"No...not really."
"Hmmm...well. I have a feeling that's the best I can do, since your experience of time is much fuller than mine."
"Most people wouldn't say that."
"Well, then, most people would be wrong. From my point of view, eating a piece of cake is much more interesting and certainly tastes better than eating a little flour, then some baking soda, then some salt, some baking powder, a bit of raw egg, a teaspoon of vanilla..."
"...make that chocolate..."
"...okay, unsweetened baking chocolate, some sugar and washing it all down with milk."
As the conversation continued, her confusion wasn't allayed. Neither did my desire to clear it up for her succeed. I tried several methods to explain something I don't really understand myself. Finally, though, despite my failure, just before she went to the bathroom her brow began to smooth. She released some tension by joking, "Well, right at this point in time, I have to go to the bathroom. I hope you're with me, instead of being someplace else in time."
"You bet, Mom. I'm with you. I'll go ahead and turn on the lights for you so we both arrive at the same place at the same time and can see each other there."
We both chuckled.
Once we were back in the living room, she said, "So, you're saying that I'm experiencing time differently than you. You haven't baked your cake, yet."
"Well, yeah. I'm still stuck in one time experience, Mom. And, you know, now that I'm thinking of time experiences like baking a cake, I think you're the lucky one. You experience both the ingredients and the cake."
"What difference does that make?"
"I think that my insistence that the past is past and out of my experience means that there is sadness attached to memory for me, because I'm experiencing memory only as memory, as something gone, that I can't recapture in my present. You're experiencing memory as happening now, continuing to happen all around you, so the sadness factor evaporates. Not only that, but your memories have a substance that mine don't. Right now, I'm thinking, I can't wait until I get to where you are and I can experience anything and everything, at my leisure, right now."
"Well," she said, "don't worry. You'll get there."
"Should I try to hurry it?" I teased.
"I wouldn't if I were you, but that's up to you."
"Okay," I said, "maybe I'd better stay where I am in regard to time, since you and I still need me to walk the line. I'll bake my cake when you've eaten your way into the center of yours and all that exists for you is cake."
"When I'm dead," she said, bluntly.
That surprised me. I wasn't sure she'd get the metaphor. "Yeah," I said, then veered away from that discussion. "I'm awfully particular about cake, you know."
"Speaking of cake," she said, "I think I'd like chocolate cake for my birthday tomorrow."
I laughed. "Well, from my perspective, your birthday isn't happening until next Wednesday. I'm not ready for it. Do you suppose we could agree to walk the straight and narrow to it, so I have some time to put together a good birthday for you?"
She breathed a mock sigh. "If you insist," she said. "In that case, I'm expecting a spectacular one. Cake, I mean."
Luckily, we still have some frozen pieces of Mom's favored Costco chocolate cake, so I don't need to put that on my linear shopping list. Then again, what would be the harm in scouting out a different chocolate cake, just for the fun of tickling her time-out-of-time tummy?
"No. I'd agree with you," I said.
"But, earlier you said that I was wrong about being in Mt. Vernon (Iowa; where she went to college) not too long ago."
"No, I said that the way I understand it, it's been 64 years since you've been in Mt. Vernon, since you graduated college in 1942, and you left soon after that. I also said that you're perceiving time differently, now, than me. I'd even go so far as to say that you're making time differently than me, now. Or, maybe, sometimes, you're not making it, anymore. Instead, you've graduated to the point where you can walk in and out of the factory whenever you feel like it. So, we're both right, within our separate contexts. Since I'm experiencing time as strictly linear, to me it's been 64 years since you were in Mt. Vernon. Before I was born. For you, though, with your expanded experience of time, when you woke up this evening it had been only, what, a year or so since you'd been there?"
"Oh, I'd say, a couple of years."
"Okay."
"I still say, something's not right."
"Well, what's not right is that you and I are in different time zones, now."
"But, if you and I agree that I've been sitting here for 10 minutes, then we're not in different time zones."
"Oh, yeah, you're right. I guess what it is, then, is that I'm still only in one time zone, the linear one that we all agree on shortly after we're born. You, though, are not only able to be in linear time, you can also can also experience time in different ways, and you can escape it, if you want. What I refer to as the past or present, which I still believe I cannot experience at the same 'time'," I stabbed mock quotes in the air with my fingers, "you have the ability to experience simultaneously."
"What about the future?"
"Well, I don't know. Can you also experience the future in the present?"
She thought about this for a moment. "No, I don't think so."
"Maybe," I suggested, "that's still to come."
Mom awoke about forty-five minutes previous to the above conversation. As is fairly usual, now, when she awoke she wanted to know if I'd, "heard anything about [her younger maternal uncle] and [her maternal grandfather]."
First I reviewed the death dates, contrasting those with where she and I are in linear time, now, 2006. Then I said, "You must have been visiting Mt. Vernon while you were sleeping."
"No, she'd said, "but I was there not too long ago, and so were Grandpa and [younger maternal uncle], so I know they can't be dead."
This paradox was troubling her more than usual yesterday evening, so, I decided, maybe this time we should talk it out while I attempt to explain her expanded conception of time versus my own severely restricted conception of it.
There's a reason I felt nominally qualified to try this. Some years ago when living in Seattle I had what I suppose most people would consider an hallucinatory experience while I was driving to work one morning. Sitting at a frontage road stoplight, just previous to merging onto West Marginal Way, I shifted, without warning or premonition, to my side and watched myself manufacture time. I saw the "stuff" which we mold into time enter me at a downward angle, as though it was coming from "the sky", through my back, rearrange itself inside me, exit through my front and lay itself down before me path-like. No, I wasn't on drugs. At that time I didn't even take vitamin supplements. I hadn't altered my normal morning routine that day. The only related aspect of my life was that I'd been spending some months in deep thought, punctuated maybe once a week with deep discussion with a friend and considerably more often with deep reading of and listening to others from both spiritual and scientific perspectives, about what I can only describe as various life mysteries. One of those mysteries had not been the mystery of time. I had, though, been considering, for some years, the concept of systems, along with the idea that the system within which we live, while tightly knit, isn't the only system existent and, most likely, not the only one available to us. The revelation I had about the nature of time was a surprise but not, in retrospect, incomprehensible in context. Since I'd been a young teen I'd wrestled with my memory of time moving much more slowly when I was a good 10 years younger than it did "in the present". Instead of assuming this was a quirky and altogether incorrect perception, I'd approached it from the possibility that time does, indeed "move more slowly" for the young and quickens its pace as we age. Maybe, I considered, we exist out of time before we are born then learn how to make time once we are born, in order to bond with our species. The more facile we become at making time in accordance with the society we keep, the faster time moves for us.
Since I've been living with my mother it has occurred to me that, at some point, we make time so fast that some of us shoot out of time and begin experiencing our lives as of a piece rather than in pieces. So, I figured, even though I continue to exist in linear time, maybe I have enough of an "understanding" of time and no-time that I can help my mother make sense of what seem to her like troubling disparities.
"Try this, Mom, and see how it works for you," I'd said earlier, when she'd tried to insist that I was saying she was wrong about what she was remembering and I was telling her, "No, you're not wrong, we're just in different time zones, Mom. Consider all the moments of your life ingredients you've decided to use to bake a cake. Each ingredient is separate before you begin. They look different from one another, taste different, occupy different spaces. You mix them up, bake them, and when you pull the cake out, cut a slice and eat it, the ingredients that an hour ago you would have had to eat separately and at different times, you can now eat all at once. Does that help?"
"No...not really."
"Hmmm...well. I have a feeling that's the best I can do, since your experience of time is much fuller than mine."
"Most people wouldn't say that."
"Well, then, most people would be wrong. From my point of view, eating a piece of cake is much more interesting and certainly tastes better than eating a little flour, then some baking soda, then some salt, some baking powder, a bit of raw egg, a teaspoon of vanilla..."
"...make that chocolate..."
"...okay, unsweetened baking chocolate, some sugar and washing it all down with milk."
As the conversation continued, her confusion wasn't allayed. Neither did my desire to clear it up for her succeed. I tried several methods to explain something I don't really understand myself. Finally, though, despite my failure, just before she went to the bathroom her brow began to smooth. She released some tension by joking, "Well, right at this point in time, I have to go to the bathroom. I hope you're with me, instead of being someplace else in time."
"You bet, Mom. I'm with you. I'll go ahead and turn on the lights for you so we both arrive at the same place at the same time and can see each other there."
We both chuckled.
Once we were back in the living room, she said, "So, you're saying that I'm experiencing time differently than you. You haven't baked your cake, yet."
"Well, yeah. I'm still stuck in one time experience, Mom. And, you know, now that I'm thinking of time experiences like baking a cake, I think you're the lucky one. You experience both the ingredients and the cake."
"What difference does that make?"
"I think that my insistence that the past is past and out of my experience means that there is sadness attached to memory for me, because I'm experiencing memory only as memory, as something gone, that I can't recapture in my present. You're experiencing memory as happening now, continuing to happen all around you, so the sadness factor evaporates. Not only that, but your memories have a substance that mine don't. Right now, I'm thinking, I can't wait until I get to where you are and I can experience anything and everything, at my leisure, right now."
"Well," she said, "don't worry. You'll get there."
"Should I try to hurry it?" I teased.
"I wouldn't if I were you, but that's up to you."
"Okay," I said, "maybe I'd better stay where I am in regard to time, since you and I still need me to walk the line. I'll bake my cake when you've eaten your way into the center of yours and all that exists for you is cake."
"When I'm dead," she said, bluntly.
That surprised me. I wasn't sure she'd get the metaphor. "Yeah," I said, then veered away from that discussion. "I'm awfully particular about cake, you know."
"Speaking of cake," she said, "I think I'd like chocolate cake for my birthday tomorrow."
I laughed. "Well, from my perspective, your birthday isn't happening until next Wednesday. I'm not ready for it. Do you suppose we could agree to walk the straight and narrow to it, so I have some time to put together a good birthday for you?"
She breathed a mock sigh. "If you insist," she said. "In that case, I'm expecting a spectacular one. Cake, I mean."
Luckily, we still have some frozen pieces of Mom's favored Costco chocolate cake, so I don't need to put that on my linear shopping list. Then again, what would be the harm in scouting out a different chocolate cake, just for the fun of tickling her time-out-of-time tummy?
Comments:
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originally posted by Deb Peterson: Fri Jul 28, 05:49:00 PM 2006
Gail--What an interesting post! How true it is that the passage of time is different at different points in our lives. I always thought that this was only because as we get older, each unit of time (say, a day) occupies a smaller percentage of our life, but I like your "3-dimensional" idea of your Mom's sense of time. This appeals to me--the more I think about it, the more I see this idea as a wonderful antidote to the rather rigid "norm" we maintain of mental health. If we are not experiencing time in a linear manner, (so they say), then something is wrong. But what if individuals can experience the past and present, overlapping? My mother does the same thing--and I think it's so valuable to consider this and try to create an analogy or an image for it, and the cake is a great way of presenting it.
I have been reading--very slowly--Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and the physicist's concept of time is extremely relative. It's theoretically true that if you or I could travel at the speed of light, time would "slow" down. We measure time by a clock, but that's only because we (on earth) are all more or less travelling at the same rate of speed. So what I'm suggesting is that time is more innate than I expected because it's part of our being. Phew. I've got to think some more about this. I love the fact that the conversation began when your mother was on the toilet!
Gail--What an interesting post! How true it is that the passage of time is different at different points in our lives. I always thought that this was only because as we get older, each unit of time (say, a day) occupies a smaller percentage of our life, but I like your "3-dimensional" idea of your Mom's sense of time. This appeals to me--the more I think about it, the more I see this idea as a wonderful antidote to the rather rigid "norm" we maintain of mental health. If we are not experiencing time in a linear manner, (so they say), then something is wrong. But what if individuals can experience the past and present, overlapping? My mother does the same thing--and I think it's so valuable to consider this and try to create an analogy or an image for it, and the cake is a great way of presenting it.
I have been reading--very slowly--Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and the physicist's concept of time is extremely relative. It's theoretically true that if you or I could travel at the speed of light, time would "slow" down. We measure time by a clock, but that's only because we (on earth) are all more or less travelling at the same rate of speed. So what I'm suggesting is that time is more innate than I expected because it's part of our being. Phew. I've got to think some more about this. I love the fact that the conversation began when your mother was on the toilet!
originally posted by Mona Johnson: Sat Jul 29, 07:54:00 AM 2006
This is what I mean about your philosophical approach Gail - I find your posts endlessly entertaining! But no wonder you need some alone time once in a while - this kind of creativity is tiring!
This is what I mean about your philosophical approach Gail - I find your posts endlessly entertaining! But no wonder you need some alone time once in a while - this kind of creativity is tiring!
originally posted by Bailey Stewart: Sat Jul 29, 01:34:00 PM 2006
Oh to have your mental facilities right now - I lost mine about a year ago. I'm not being flippant, I've been having cognitive problems for a while and it gets worse the further along my mother progresses. Although, to be truthful, I never did have the ability to "think" in that way - that's why logic problems always beat me. I like your concept of time, too bad my mother is too far along to even comprehend it.
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Oh to have your mental facilities right now - I lost mine about a year ago. I'm not being flippant, I've been having cognitive problems for a while and it gets worse the further along my mother progresses. Although, to be truthful, I never did have the ability to "think" in that way - that's why logic problems always beat me. I like your concept of time, too bad my mother is too far along to even comprehend it.
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