When we look at the clock and think it is telling us THE time, then there’s the time, this abstract time that’s passing us by, and then there’s this clock. We almost don’t even think of that as a relationship. It’s almost like the abstract time that’s passing us by is driving this clock. This poor clock. Maybe driving us all. But when physics is telling us how clocks behave, and how there’s not one clock that we can say is the true time, then we’re left with this clock relative to the other clock. This particular changing thing, and that particular changing thing, and a relation between them. There is no truer time. There are two times and they change relative to each other. Neither is more “the real” time than the other.
The clocks really do run at different speeds—the faster a clock is traveling, the slower its time goes—and we couldn’t even use our GPS without accounting for that. We can’t perceive that in our own experience. That web of relations amongst this multitude of times is not something we need to usually pay attention to as we go about our daily living. But there’s such a habitual sense of checking the clock and feeling that I’m looking at “the” time—and maybe that we can begin to dismantle. Maybe this fact about clocks in relativity is something that supports us in reclaiming the flow of time into each particular changing thing that’s affecting and being affected with each other. Everything and anything can be a clock, and there’s no one clock that’s telling “the” time. Maybe everything is, in a way, its own time.
So we might come to feel the breath itself as a clock. I’m not going to say that this is the best clock ever. But this rhythm of widening and coming closer together is a kind of clock. We get to be a clock. That might not be the most inspiring thought you’ve ever had. What—I’m just a clock? Maybe feeling into the effect of getting to own “being a clock.”
What if that rhythm is only in relation to other rhythms? What if that rhythm is only in a web of other rhythms? There’s no one time that our breath is happening in.
I’ve been so struck at how much flow time has been stealing from me. The flow of time has seemed to monopolize flow. What’s it like to feel the flow of breath in itself? A flow in this web of flows. All relative to each other. All interacting. And then in an exploration like this, it’s like this small explosion, blossoming of all these particular flows, reclaimed from the abstract sense of time passing us by.
No Time, No Problem?
An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living
What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering?
Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji—to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries.
Thank you for Being with Being.
beingwithbeing.org
mackenziehawkins.substack.com
