Time Noodle

My partner was telling me the other day about a story in 'Concrete' by Paul Chadwick, in which the titular character imagines what it would be like if we experienced time differently, if we perceived ourselves not as a being tethered inside a discrete moment, but as the foremost tendril of every moment of our lives. In the comic, his body reaches back through every place he has ever been, back and back to the day he was born.

I like to imagine my life stretching backwards and forwards, as one moment. I am not just myself in the here and now, cut off from the things that have happened and the things that will happen. Much suffering comes from feeling bereft of our past, or fear for our future, for the things that may happen or may never happen. The practice of mindfulness aims to teach us to be absolutely in the present, to experience everything that is to be experienced in the here and now, and not to be wrapped up in our past or our future. This is about experiencing the self differently, about stepping outside the self, or discovering the self from a true and objective place rather than from within our own framework of past and future, hopes and desires and fears. I recently attended a meditation workshop and we explored the idea of samsara (life as a cycle of suffering) and of rebirth and reincarnation (just as it sounds). I found this idea comforting; a life without a deadline by which time I must prove myself worthwhile.

When I imagine life as a physical part of my body stretching backward and forward, when my self is everything that it has been and everything that it ever will be, I can put to rest the voices that cry out, 'I miss those days', 'I will never do anything that important again', 'What if I never get there?', 'Do they feel the same ?', 'Every day my life is getting shorter'. I can be inside a memory more fully; because I put to one side the pain of being cut off from it, of being trapped here, partitioned off from my past and future. Because I am at once a newborn full of potential, an impassioned adolescent and a diminished old woman on her deathbed. I am connected to everything that I will ever do and experience and every person I have ever been - rather than condemning my present self as not worthwhile, next to these past and future selves. It makes me feel calm. I suppose I am then the person that I am to other people - not confined to my own present mindstate - or the person I will be remembered as after I am gone.