What If Time Is Really Just Space?

I had a dream last night. One where I was in the middle of an epic journey. There were labyrinths and escapes and people to find and pitfalls to avoid and oceans and foreign lands and tales to tell along the way. And then I awoke. In my own bed, not having traveled any farther than the covers would allow.

Maybe the dream’s message is that this is like life. None of us actually travel very far. Though we imagine we do. We imagine these long, strange lifelines, where over time we have transcended several versions of our former selves, along with our habits, our thoughts, our magnetic pulls, our veering towards our own true north.

Maybe we imagine ourselves better, healed, different. Maybe we were not asleep as long as we thought. And the train hasn’t even left the station yet. Maybe time isn’t real, after all. Maybe the whole time-space continuum is a dream. Maybe we move neither on the x nor the y axis.

Maybe our whole lives are nothing more than the space between the in breath and out breath while sitting still on a meditation pillow.

We forget how strange life is. We forget all the unthinkable absurd truths. Like Buckminster Fuller reminded us, all the things we originally learned in school become more and more questionable the more we know. Such as, “there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

There are many other mind-blowing facts, including that the Earth rotates on its axis approximately 1,000 miles per hours. And it travels around the sun at a speed of approximately 67,000 miles per hour. Which means that in a single 24-hour period, the Earth travels approximately 1,598,784 miles. Here’s more: The sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at about 447,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way moves relative to other galaxies at about 1.3 million miles per hour.

Which brings us back to time. I am not pretending to understand the conundrum of time. Or why Zen masters tell us that it does not exist. One hint, though, it that the night sky is a kind of time machine. The starlight we see in the sky with our naked eyes in most cases actually left those orbs thousands of years ago, usually between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago. However, with the James Webb Space Telescope, we can see back about 13.5 billion years, which is when the first stars and galaxies began to form after the Big Bang.

In other words, we can see the past. Which does give us some insight into the question of time. If we can see the past, then time must not exist on some kind of linear path. Instead, it must be something more like that the Universe is just bigger than our eyes and minds can see or even conceive. That it all actually exists at once, if we just had a wide enough lens to see it all.

Bringing this back to ourselves, what if all the parts of us exist at once. What if we could get far enough away from ourselves to see that who we are includes all of us, every moment from birth to death. What if somewhere someone in another solar system can see us right now as toddlers, taking our first steps, or teenagers experiencing our first kiss, or watching our children being born.

And just when I have you in this mindset of wholeness and oneness and timelessness, also consider that almost all of our cells are constantly regenerating. Some of them every few weeks, some take as long as 15 years. But physiologically, we do not stay the same over time. To add numbers to this idea, somewhere around 330 billion cells are replaced daily. Which means that over the span of 100 days, more than 30 trillion cells are remade.

And back to the starlight question. Does this cellular regeneration happen over time? Or it is just through space?

And why am I even talking about all this stuff, when all you really want to know is how to cure your heartache, or how you are going to make it to the weekend, or the midterms, or graduation, or retirement. Because I haven’t even talked about the future yet. If we can expand our focus to see 13 billion years ago, can we also see into the future? Can we look through a telescope and know how our kids will turn out? Whether we’ll find the love of our life? If everything is going to work out the way we hope?

Maybe. Maybe we just don’t know how to look yet. Maybe it isn’t just about being present, from a right here, right now viewpoint. Maybe it is about widening our gaze. Maybe we want the things we want, because part of us can see the full sky, the past and the future. And like the beautiful scene on the horizon, we can’t wait to be there. Maybe we exist in space, but time is something we made up, because our human minds have limited vision. Maybe creating the life we want is just a matter of seeing clearly, of broadening our vision, of opening our hearts to welcome it.