I can’t figure out Time. As a concept of limitedness, it has always inspired my activism, but as a marker of our mortality, it takes on an entirely different hue. Even activism doesn’t seem like enough. My dad is very sick and Time seems to be both standing still and moving much too quickly. I am suspended somewhere between this stillness and this panic, and am trying to glean God’s lesson in it without letting fear overcome the desire to learn and to appreciate the complexity of it all.
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In Einstein’s Dreams, a book about Einstein’s theories of Time and its relation to beauty, ambition, love, dreams, and realizations, Time is described as linear, circular, moving backward, forward, stuck in the past, the future, and, for the lucky few, in the present. I have spent much of my life in many of these various modes and think, perhaps, that the present is beckoning me to yet another concept of Time.
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When you live your life in constant interaction with God’s Signs, nothing is trivial and everything is beautiful. It makes an imperfect present a perfect stepping stone to a greater future. Time, for me, has thus always been both the tunnel and the light at the end. I have experienced life, and have lived to experience it.
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Time is both the circle and the line. I work on my present, knowing it’ll one day be my past, and I have learned that our past always somehow interferes with our future. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do with Time what you would want Time to do with you. When I think about my present as if it were also my past and my future, I know better what to do.
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If Time is moving backward, forward, in circles and lines, in squares, triangles, spirals–if it is telescopic and scattered–then perhaps the best way for me to deal with Time now is to put aside my ideas of past and future and somehow let myself be caught in Time’s motion and shape. In spirals there are recurrent beginnings and ends, and I think that I can find comfort in that…at least for now.
–Asma Uddin