I have been paying attention, of late, to how everything seems to happen at once. By ‘at once’ I don’t mean ‘one thing after another’. I actually mean ‘at once’, at the same time. We are accustomed to thinking of ‘time’ as linear, that is that it plays itself out moment to moment. We are born, we live a series of moments, and then we die, and are gone. Like walking on a centerline down the road and then disappearing off in the distance. Vanishing like a mirage in the desert. I am beginning to understand, and appreciate, that it might not be like that at all. That in fact we might actually be that mirage.
Throughout the course of my life I have had an inordinate number of friends die suddenly, at early ages, and from a myriad of unexpected circumstances. Most of my friends. However, it always feels like they are not really gone, but living in the invisible world, around me, beside me, with me and without me. As if they are here, and as if they were never here. All of that at once. I suppose some psychologists would call it a continuing, and prolonged, sense of grief. Others might consider it a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But I think that there is no differentiation, or separation, between when my friends were here and when they died, or between when they died and how they continue to be here. I think it is all the same. I think life really does happen all at once. All in the blink of an eye.
I am reminded of the people who have had near death experiences, who have faced their own demise in an unexpected moment. Whether the instant before a head-on collision, or when a heart suddenly stops beating. These people will invariably say that their lives flashed before their eyes in a very brief moment, like a quick glance in the mirror, revealing their entire life as if it were in a single breath. That’s it. If it only takes a nano-second to review ones life, perhaps life is actually lived in a similar nano-second. Otherwise, even on ‘fast-forward’, wouldn’t you think it would take a bit longer?
Maybe that’s how life actually is. That it all happens at once. That there really is no such thing as time after all. That the review is actually the life, and that life doesn’t really happen, it just is. It’s difficult to think in these terms, kind of strains the brain, but if we think of time, as we know it, in relation to eternity, then the span of a lifetime is so insignificant as to not even allow itself to be measured. And if eternity happens all at once, which I think it does, can that same lifetime even be considered in terms of measurement at all? There is no time. There is only now.
Ouch.
Everything happens at once.
And we might be a mirage.
Don’t ask me how I know it,
but I’m pretty sure I do.
And I’ll probably lose a lot of readers.
Something else to try and wrap our heads around:
Scientists are now saying that there are more stars in our galaxy
than there are grains of sand on the earth.
And that there are more galaxies in the universe
than there are stars in our galaxy.
