2.1

From generation to generation
Time is in every moment and in all places. It is in the essence of all that exists. Its touch can’t be felt with fingers but it moves all things, leaving its imprint of change in growth and life, in decay and death. Time informs the extent of all things, continually weighing and measuring. The experience of time is often reduced to little more than a mode of measuring change and duration, but it penetrates far more deeply than measurements. Time permeates existence so thoroughly, it is impossible to be or know anything apart from it. It is in time that the contents of this world is immersed, animating their movements and qualities: from the micro motions of atoms to the cosmic travels of galaxies; from a heart beating with life for the coming moment to a heart that suddenly stops and starts its process of decay

Time endures through all changes and reveals the quality, shape and function of all that composes the universe. Its reliable presence allows us to know what we can know, structuring in an apprehensible way how to live in our world as a life moving and changing among other lives and matter in space. Change makes possible our knowing and experiencing. Without the dynamics of change to make distinctions we can perceive and define, we would not be able to live or know anything. How, then, can we know this time that enables us to know if it is as philosophers and scientists had for so long claimed it to be: absolute and immutable? How can we know time if it never changes for our senses to perceive it?

Since Einstein discovered and explained the movements of time in his theories of relativity, science has understood time very differently from our human experience of it. He discovered time’s nature is not what we had believed it to be. Time is not an unchanging presence in the universe but it moves and is moved by space. It configures space and responds to it. Time’s surprising responsiveness may assume such strange shapes as loops, warps and worm holes. These shapes, however, have barely any relevance to our time on earth. They do not compute in our experience of time that effects unchanging changes and pursues a single future direction. In the nontheoretical world of an ordinary life, we change for time but time doesn’t change for us. We are left to discern time’s presence only by participating in its effects, reliably changing by creating and destroying, growing and decaying. We will continue learning about such things as time travels and parallel universes in years to come but they will not alter the effects of time on us. The integral relation of life/time cannot be severed by physics’ space/time. Einstein’s relative time cannot change or replace the time that we live and that lives us, every day

As powerful as time’s presence is, it tends to be ignored. We don’t usually try to look directly at it or consider how it looks back at us. We watch clocks and see seconds and hours and days go by but we don’t typically try to peer beyond them to the time they are measuring. We don’t try to look directly at time because we can’t. We see its influences on life and things in space, but these things do not show or explain their unseen source. It seems reasonable, then, to relegate time to some vague state of irrelevance, not trusting to find in it any personal meaning. Is there no way to know this dimension of life that so greatly affects us? When we try to search time out and see how entirely the time that runs our life eludes all effort to know or acquire it, we discover how completely helpless we are in time

Despite its invisible and elusive presence, time’s influence follows certain predictable patterns that can teach us how it can be handled. These patterns bring time within our reach to accommodate it and live as well as possible in it. Two of time’s most recognizable patterns are its linear and its cyclical movements. Time travels forward in linear history, moving unique events along unique consecutive moments that exist now before they are forever consigned to the past. The time of history is measured and described by circumstances that are always changing, whether or not their changes are perceived. Nothing is allowed to stand still. Time patterns all things and life in space as a constant and uninterrupted changing process of beginnings, evolvings and endings

Simultaneous to history are the cycles that order nature. Time interrelates all aspects of nature in cyclical patterns, intertwining days with nights, seasons with years, celestial objects with each other along very specific velocities and distances. The biological rhythms of life are thoroughly shaped and ordered by cyclical time. At its smallest cellular level, life is run by a biological clock that is cyclical, like the circadian rhythms of sleeping and waking and the grand cycle of birth and death. Activities of life are also ordered in cycles such as ingesting and eliminating, working and resting, living and dying. Animals track over and over again their migrations. Time cycles its order and nature into our lives, sustaining us along the same path traveled by all the universe. Cycles and history are time’s inseparable sisters that move as one. Together, they describe the nature of life and our experience of time

Our direct experience of linear time is the present which becomes the past at the same time that the future becomes the present. We don’t directly experience the past other than as present memories or present effects of past events. We don’t directly experience the future except as present anticipations of it. Time’s cycles are directly experienced as they either enlarge or diminish the present. The predictable process of time’s interacting history and cycles allows us to cooperate with time and live as best as we can in it. We can plan according to the daily cycle of the sun rising at the same time that each day is new in history. We can assume the nature of time is what it has always been, so it is easy to relegate it to life’s backdrop, even though it never takes a back seat to life. Time never cedes its dominance over us

Both linear and cyclical times are different sides of the one time we live in, different faces of each single moment. Memories record unique events where countless details converge that can never be repeated in just that same way again. And yet, we know that history does somehow repeat itself in fundamental ways. Our past returns as patterns and memories into our present, and its repetition is essential to our linear progress. Every moment and thing reflect new possibilities of the same universe that maintains a constant nature, ever returning to its source and parameters. Time describes the ongoing relationship between change and constancy, between the singular and the recurring, the unexpected and the predictable. In every life, memories return and repeat themselves but each time they resurface, they are changed by time. Whether or not we can perceive these changes, there must be changes as must all things change when touched by time

Linear and cyclical times are the one time. The presence of each impresses and must be impressed by the other. Time’s nature at any given moment can be described by the life of a tree, from its beginning as a seed to its end. From birth to death, the tree moves through cycles of seasons and years that add rings to its trunk and branches and leaves and flowers and fruit that are all the unfolding of its potential when a mere seed. The tree’s growth requires that it move both forward in time and return again and again to an abiding order and nature God established from its beginning. A seed falls from the dying tree to the earth and breaks open to become a new tree, a new generation in the faithful cycle of generations