Meditations on time

Moving with and against the temporal flow

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30 years ago I sat in a classroom nestled somewhere in the heart of Singapore’s suburbia, listening to a lesson on the life-cycle of a butterfly. I found it somewhat bemusing that butterflies had fixed life stages - the egg, the larva (caterpillar), the pupa (chrysalis), and the adult butterfly, all encapsulated in a geometrically precise circle. Human growth, by comparison, seemed less defined and more nuanced, even a little bit unsettling. Whilst my peers were buried deep into their textbooks, I was fixated on what the ‘future me’ would be like.

I enjoyed these brief mental escapades because it felt like I was playing a game of probabilities, weighing up the likelihood of experiencing certain future realities over others, through the passage of time. And if I’m being perfectly honest, it was a welcome distraction from the sterile mundanity of primary school education. Or maybe it was just that I found the science curriculum rather uninspiring, particularly in how it left the more existential questions unanswered.

Either way, my childhood ponderings had an innocent charm and randomness about them.

Will I be tall? Probably. I was a lanky kid growing up. Will I grow a beard? I hoped I didn’t - the itch would drive me insane - ‘imagine having fur on your face’, or so I thought, now spotting a full beard. Will I be a parent? The thought of bossing around my very own little charges was an attractive proposition in my 7-year old mind. Well, as luck would have it, I’m being bossed by my own little charges now.

Beyond these pressing questions, I was also preoccupied with specific visual signifiers of adulthood. For example, I was obsessed with neckties and suits so much so that I decided I’d only choose an occupation that mandated a formal dress code. It didn’t matter what the job was - that was a trivial detail. Fast forward 30 years and my views have somewhat shifted - the tie will always be symbolic of ones’ enslavement to global corporatism. But that’s for another article.

Either way, the progression of time and our perception of the change(s) it brings is an intriguing subject.

Despite its forward momentum, time is fleeting. We are embroiled in a continuous struggle to accept the transient nature of every moment. We’ve developed an inconsolable longing for permanency amid a universe driven by perpetual change and inevitable loss. Through this desire for fixity, we find ourselves at the mercy of circumstance, hoping for a semblance of order, finding ways to immortalise moments at every opportunity. In this regard, social media has concretised our longing for permanence, functioning on the promise that memories, events and moments could not only be preserved but also mutually shared. We’ve become skilled amateur archivists stamping our digital footprints everywhere we go, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, if we ever lose our way back to the past.

In some ways, you could argue that we are programmed by society to work against the natural flow of time. We want to slow it down, stretch it at its margins and sometimes, even revisit bits of it that have passed. We are in a never-ending war against the flow of time, a struggle that we don’t always openly acknowledge because we’re shrouded from it. In every nook and cranny of society we are surreptitiously seduced by the media and its neoliberal ecosystem, into thinking less about each passing moment and more about its potential outcome and consequence. We overlook the fact that all moments are tiny temporal atoms that pass as quickly as they arrive. Blink and you’ll miss it. Transformation is abound everywhere whether we think we’re in control or not.

But every transformation is invariably a loss, and the transformed must be mourned before the transformed-into can be relished. Just like the butterfly, beneath the protective layers of the chrysalis, there is something much more significant happening than growth alone - the old is being undone. That is an inevitable facet of living and it is expressed beautifully through the eyes of American author and musician Patti Smith on the disorientation of aging:

I considered what it meant to be sixty-six. The same number as the original American highway, the celebrated Mother Road that George Maharis, as Buz Murdock, took as he tooled across the country in his Corvette, working on oil rigs and trawlers, breaking hearts and freeing junkies. Sixty-six, I thought, what the hell. I could feel my chronology mounting, snow approaching. I could feel the moon, but I could not see it. The sky was veiled with a heavy mist illuminated by the perpetual city lights. When I was a girl the night sky was a great map of constellations, a cornucopia spilling the crystalline dust of the Milky Way across its ebony expanse, layers of stars that I would deftly unfold in my mind. I noticed the threads on my dungarees straining across my protruding knees. I’m still the same person, I thought, with all my flaws intact, same old bony knees…

Patti’s words point towards a fluidity of the past and present - a perennially unfinished dance between who we were, who we are and who we might become. She concludes with the comforting assurance that although time eventually subsumes everything we love - people, places, possessions- the vestiges of these loves are permanently engraved in our hearts and souls (“I’m still the same person”) . This is the only permanence that truly matters.

While change is constant, the liberation from its shackles rests in the acceptance of it, through wilful surrender. I wonder if those science classes would have been more palatable had I done the same. I guess I’ll never know.