Timing Is Everything (or, The Times of My Life)

Squibs & Blurbs

by Jerry Zimmerman

“Time is on my side.” —The Rolling Stones

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—5/2/11—I just read an article in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger) about a young scientist by the name of David Eagleman. Dr. Eagleman is interested in how time works and how our brains perceive time. Although, as a scientist, he is trying to find hard facts to understand the concept of time, he often veers off into theory and conjecture that are more like the thoughts of a meditating monk than of a scientist.

Eagleman’s earliest experience of wondering about time came when he was just eight years old. While playing (unsafely) with friends, he managed to fall off the roof of a half-constructed house. He vividly remembers the experience—time slowed down completely and he was later able perfectly to recollect the details of the objects around him, the strange and peaceful quietude within himself, and his clarity of thought.

Reading this brought me back to my own earliest experience of time “standing still.”

About 25 years ago, I was riding my motorcycle up the West Side Highway in Manhattan. Let’s just say I wasn’t going particularly slow. While switching lanes, I hit an oil patch on the road and, before I knew it, my bike was no longer under me and I was bouncing along, literally head-over-heels, on the side of the road.

Even as I was violently banging along, first hitting my feet and then hitting my helmeted head, over and over again, I felt calm. I clearly remember thinking at each smack of my noggin on the ground: “Thank God I have a helmet on!”

And I thought it each and every time!

Luckily, I survived intact and my memory of that exact moment is as clear as if it happened, as they say, yesterday.

This is one of the fascinating mysteries of time that has inspired Eagleman’s work: if time is a precise measurement, how can it actually seem much slower and much faster to us, depending on our circumstances? And I’m sure we’ve all had some experience of the amazing elasticity of supposedly immutable time.

But the mysteries of time are many. A couple of years ago, I had the unbelievable experience of traveling outside of time.

It happened like it was described in all my favorite science fiction stories. You are here one moment and—Poof! —you are somewhere else the next moment.

Surprisingly, it was my first colonoscopy that precipitated this remarkable event.

Being of a certain age, which means old enough to be coerced into undergoing a test you feel no real need for, I reluctantly made an appointment with a local doctor.

I was assured it was a painless procedure so, grinning and prepared to bear it, I presented myself at the appointed hour at the office. Everyone was very pleasant and I soon found myself on a gurney, in a hospital gown, with a friendly nurse giving me an IV of some prep drugs. She left me for a moment, saying the doctor would be with me soon.

After a minute or two, another nurse walked by and I nervously asked when the doctor would be there. She replied, “Oh, you’re already done.”

Wha-a-a-at?!!

How could that be? I was just lying there for a moment and I was done? Obviously, a nice chunk of time had gone by in my life without my having had any perception of it. But this wasn’t like sleeping, where upon waking you have some sense of actual time passing, even while you are basically unconscious. This was flat-out time-travel, without even a hint that a real part of my life had just gone by.

This was my first experience of this and, even though it was drug-induced, it was freaky.

These quirks of time are fascinating and engaging, yet they pale by comparison to the real question: what IS time?

What does it mean to have a past, a present, and a future? How can my past be gone if I still often feel that I can relive old moments? Aren’t events that have gone by and even events that are about to happen all part of my real life? Which part of the “time” of my life truly exists? Just this moment? All moments? Only the moments I have experienced so far?

Whether there is a time before we are born or after we die is another whole ball of wax. Just that tidy block of events that happen between birth and death are enough to keep me on my toes and wondering. I can still relive exactly moments from my past: running in my yard as a kid, being in school as a teen, waking up with a giant hangover in college, walking outside the hospital after my first child was born. These are moments from my past, but they still resonate in me as real and continuing parts of my life.

And the future is there, sitting around the corner, poised to be what it will be. When awake to it, I have been stunned to see those moments when the present plows into the next part of time, exposing the future as being the new now. Don’t all moments of my life exist right now (whatever “now” is)?

I have begun to understand this life/time question in terms that I first read about in Tertium Organum, a book by P. D. Ouspensky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Ouspensky), a Russian mystic/philosopher and student of G. I. Gurdjieff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff). Ouspensky’s model of Time is that of a continuum that has all of our life on it, from start to finish. Our understanding of the “present” is the spot we happen to be looking at (living) at this particular moment. We proceed linearly through our filmstrip of events, seeing clearly only the small section of our life projected through the lens of “today.”

I am comforted by this explanation—in my bones I know that my past is still vivid and meaningful and I can sense my future waiting patiently for me in the next moment. And, yet, this theory begs the next big question: if everything exists already, where does my free will fit in?

Holy Mackerel—another Big Question!

I just need more time to work it out.