The Fickle Nature of Time

I have had the luck of spending a great deal of time, when I was in college, among physicists and mathematicians earning their PhD. By the time you get to a doctorate, you have more questions than answers—much of what other people are sure about, you are not.

Time is one of those things. I rather enjoyed the time I spent talking to those doctorate students on the topic of time. It was a fascinating set of discussions. We have so much more ignorance than anything else.

I get asked about the future often in readings. Three months, six months, years in advance, treating time as if it is a book, linear and already written. I always want to respond by telling people that it is the prerogative of the divine to be able to treat time as something already done, but that the rest of us are stuck in a series of events that are never quite decipherable, though our minds like to pretend it all makes sense.

To be clear, events do make sense. They just won’t make sense to us directly. We lack the essential capacity to see it.

Rather than answer questions like this (or ask them of the spirit), I often answer that conditions change outcomes, which is true from a human perception. We lack sight of all the things that could happen, so when we discover a condition, it is as if it just popped into existence, shattering our understanding of a situation and more importantly our expectations of the outcomes. We also lack the capacity to consider change, which seems to us as a species as if it is always a shock, a total surprise.

I can answer for a short window, but I always want to tell people they’d be better off asking about now than they do later. Time, for those of us caught in it, is fickle. It betrays us by violating our expectations and the comfort those bring us.

Time gets a lot less fickle when you stop trying to anticipate it.