Have you learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?…That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadows of the past, nor the shadow of the future?—Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
What an absurd notion it must be to anyone living in our time, that there’s no such thing as time. Consider the preceding sentence and how it depends conceptually on time: “in our time” could be replaced with words like “now” or “today,” but no matter what we choose, the word to change “living” must, in this context, be temporal. It’s natural for us to place ourselves in a continuum, something linear and changing, so that there’s always a past, present and future.
But consider now—yes, now, in a state of being different from the one you were in while reading the previous paragraph—a thought experiment that echoes the words of Siddhartha. Consider a world without time, a world that’s merely one giant “river,” encompassing only one state of being. In this world, we might qualify this state of being as “now,” given that it would be the active state. But in a world without time, “now” would have no meaning.
Gone would be “time” from our conceptual understanding of the world. We would operate anew without the restrictions we face in this world. No more would we find lists with names like “1000 things to do before you die,” because it seems that such lists are predicated on a certain anxiety that only comes from accepting time. No more would we have deadlines, countdowns, or time-limits.
Of course, it can be argued that these aforementioned things are necessary for human life. It’s obvious that removing the concept of time would structurally damage all areas of human life, in a sort of domino effect that could begin, for one example, in the world of work. Time forgotten, people wouldn’t be required to fulfill their obligations and the economy would suffer as a result.
Yet, we could be saved from much of what currently plagues us. Life, in its most ideal form, is now seen by many people to be a standardized linear progression, one they attempt to adhere to as much as possible. By trying to follow this progression, people attempt to accomplish everything in the same time-frame of the standardized model that exists in their minds.
We tell ourselves we must be married by age x, have kids by age x, and have a professionally rewarding career by age x. But why must any of these things come after a certain amount of time? Why must time be factored into how we live our lives? We shouldn’t let this variable be an objective measure for the quality or success of our lives.
Instead, we should see our lives as Siddhartha saw the river: singular states of being that aren’t harassed by the “shadows” of the unalterable past and the unforeseeable future.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Jasmine Soraya
image: Hometown Beauty via Compfight CC
