Time after time

I've decided that I am going to share some of the things that I have thought about in the past. A lot of these are from when I was a child. I am often amazed that some of my most interesting thoughts come from before I was formally taught anything at all.

One of the earliest things I remember is pondering the difference between things that were happening now and things that were "not now". When I was around three years old, I remember noticing that there were moments that I remembered just as clearly as the ones I was currently experiencing. The difficulty in explaining this is that I had no concept of "currently" or "remembering". To me they were exactly identical. I could look both forward and backward in time from my current position and they all seemed like "now".

The only difference I could detect was that if things were in the "past" I couldn't seem to do anything different, and if they were in the "future" things weren't here yet. For instance, I clearly saw that I was getting a bicycle for my "birthday". (It wasn't actually on my birthday... but I didn't even know what a birthday was at the time, so I guess it doesn't matter anyway.) So in my mind I saw the bike and I was excited to get it so I ran out into the front yard of my grandfather's house looking for it. It wasn't there. I saw it plain as day in my mind, yet it wasn't here. How strange! So when I asked my grandfather about it, he said he didn't have a bike for me. I told him that I say it and even described it to him. A yellow bike with a banana seat complete with training wheels.

So the next day when I got the bike, I wasn't surprised, but I was still very excited! I sure had fun riding that bike "now". It wasn't until many years later that the concepts of past, present, future kicked in. I still prefer my old way of seeing things. My more flexible outlook on time allows me to do very interesting things that I can't if I think of time more rigidly. Time is flexible, time is relative, and yet there is no such thing as time at all. Where is time? There are only moments, happenings, movements, and relationships.What you choose to do with them is up to you.