When We Are In Spacetime

Janis Joplin accurately stated once in a haze that “tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same day, man.” Well, for the most part, yes, that’s true. The planet’s daily spinning around that axis creates a metronome by which we measure the days, as we feel the need to quantify and categorize everything, but are not real.

Tomorrow—tomorrow—will be “today.” Likewise, yesterday—yesterday—was “today.” In short, it is always today. As of this entry, that happens to be the 20th day of the 6th month of the 19th year of the 21st century, in the third millennium of the Common Era, but what does that mean? Just another spin.

By the same token, every passing year is just one solar revolution, one full pass around a thermonuclear fireball some 90 million miles away that is, in the scheme of things, on the far-smaller side of stars out there, hence its appellation “yellow dwarf.” It is a common belief that time somehow speeds up as you age. Does it?

The philosopher Duncan Trussell observed that “when we think about the future, obviously that doesn’t exist—there’s no future, nothing is outside of this point in time… Your whole past, the thing you’ve been using to define yourself as a person, you barely remember!

And the parts you do remember, they’re not really clear, so that’s gone… Anything that happened before this moment, that’s… gone, it’s just this, for real. There might be some neurological encoding but there’s no past, forget it.

Or, as the Flaming Lips knew, “All we have is now.” Ram Dass had the same message, rendered much more simply: Be Here Now. That seems to be the only way you can be. “Earlier” and “later” appear to be illusions of the mind, like “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” Since time and space are one and the same, there is only now and only here.