“There’s no time like the present.” And it’s true; time experienced in the present is utterly unique: It’s ephemeral, fleeting, transitory, evanescent—you could exhaust a thesaurus describing the passing of time.  Lately, I’ve been aware of every second slipping by, an awareness that sours even the most happy occasions with the knowledge that they are not going to last.  It’s an enormous distraction. I’m not speaking about regrets, though I have them too, or the knowledge that I’m getting older, though I’m not crazy about that either. I’m talking about not being able to enjoy the moment because I know it’s a moment while it’s happening.  Every point in time is the latest point that has ever occurred. It’s now, then now, then now and so on forever.  I’m moving into a future I cannot control or even slow. There’s the impossible prayer that I could go back to any point in my life, however miserable, just so long as it’s far before I had this awareness.  Music is no solace; I no longer hear the notes as a pattern that make up a whole.  Instead it’s just one note after another, each one separate and gone forever as soon as it’s played.

 The usual meaning of “there’s no time like the present,” that now, rather than later, is the best time to do things, gains a heightened urgency from this sense of time passing.  But it doesn’t seem to be a spur to productivity.  Instead the knowledge that I’m hurtling through time and space at ferocious pace makes doing things seem absolutely pointless. Whatever you do will soon be over, so why bother?  The result is paralysis.  And a lot of late mornings spent in bed.  Nights are better, then I don’t feel so much pressure when there’s nothing left to do but sleep.   The only thing I know is that in this world, change is terribly inevitable and I fear (the father of hate) it.

 Time experienced in the past hardly seems an entirely different animal from time experienced in the present.  Past experiences can be conjured up over and over again.  The pleasant memory can be replayed endlessly, either straight as it happened, or with pleasing variations that soon become as real as the rest of the memory.  That gray day in the woods when the snow fell so softly on the pines and I saw the white hare faltering through the drifts and he stopped and we looked at each other, each of us unmoving for a moment that was a brief eternity.  And that night, with the candles and the woman, her body made of white and shadows. She whispered something particularly flattering in my ear. Maybe my boots were wet and the woman was cranky, but that’s not the way the memory is edited, and I’m happier for it. 

The past can also take on a dark intelligence of its own, penetrating the mind and bringing all the instruments of the torturer to bear on the vulnerable psyche.  The old humiliations, the ancient rejection, served up fresh and raw as the day it happened.   It’s endless torment at the hands of a tireless fiend in your head. “You must be kidding, you thought we’d be together forever? You’re crazy!” Every setback is remembered as coming about because of a personal failing on your own part. Old haunts are now avoided because their associations are too painful to bear.  

There’s not much to say about the future.  I know that no matter how distant an event seems to be, it’ll be here before I know it.  The happiest people look for the pleasures of the future, and as soon as the pleasure happens, they fix on the next event. After the child’s birth, her graduation; anything, as long as it hasn’t happened yet. My only hope is I’ll be a happy old man without regrets.  Then death, a subject for another time, though I wonder if it’s actually what this is all about. 

I would have thought the sense of time passing was universal, except that I met a man in a bar who said I was dead wrong.   Oddly enough, he brought up the topic before I did.  “I don’t think of myself as existing in time,” he said.  “Time to me is not something that’s linear.  We’re not stuck in time, moving from one point to the next, instead we sort of bounce around.  It’s like déjà vu. You know when you’ve already done something, it pops up in your dreams before it happens.” Then disconcertingly, “There’s a whole other world out there, you know.  If this is all there is, then yeah fuhgetaboutit, mine as well slit your wrists, but it’s not. Trust me.”  He leaned closer, and scratched his crotch sagely: “There’s a lot going on beneath the surface that most people never see.”  I knew what he meant, but I had forgotten.

 If it were anything but irrefutably true, I might hope this awareness of time would pass. Once aware of something, you cannot become unaware, barring amnesia. Try not thinking of the yellow bird for ½ a minute.  But there is something in what the man in the bar said.  I hope this quote is not dulled by over familiarity, but it seems appropriate: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.  It’s the things that seem the most insubstantial and unlikely, God, ghosts, aliens, philosophy, faith, psychology, magic (if one of your beliefs is included here, don’t be offended by its proximity to the other, more doubtful seeming, items on the list; remember that there are many paths up the same mountain) that offer the only hope of permanency and escape from the “tyranny of time.” In a world that moves like a raging river, these are the rocks you can cling to.