I love spring and almost everything that it has to offer, but there is one thing about spring that I simply abhor: mosquitos. There was once a time when the little buggers didn’t bother me, though I don’t know if that was truly the case or is simply the way that I remember it. Life is a funny thing when you think about all the things that you have done and that at one time it was the present. No, life’s not funny, time is. I was originally going to write about the seasons and mosquitos but I think that I’d rather wax philosophical about time, so I’m going to.
About the only thing that any of us can say about time is that it passes. Though that’s really all we can say, we don’t need to say it in so few words. The present is something that is ever present but can never be caught. The moment you think that you’ve laid hold of the present, it’s already the past. We know that there once was a present, but that’s only through memory and if you really try to delve down in your own head sometimes you can almost relive memories as though they were just happening. The problem is that the almost bit is the key bit; memory is like an analog recording – technically is one – and every copy is worse than the last. That is all that memories are, an imperfect copy of what was once the present. The duality of the present, in that it never is but always has been and in that it always is and always shall be, is an odd duality, but if one considers how many odd dualities there are in all of reality (I wanted to use the words nature, life, the universe, existence and a few others here, but realistically have to choose one so I went with being but then realized that reality was a better one and changed it after I finished this parenthetical explanation [I also changed the tense of the second word of the greater parenthetical from want to wanted because that tense seemed more appropriate once I had finished]). I appologize if you found the parenthetical of the previous sentence to be cumbersome, but, when I get myself thinking about time, I can get recursive like that. In the case of most dualities it is possible to see things from either one of the two sides but rarely to see both sides at the same time (ex. those optical illusions that have an old woman and a young woman, IHTFP [MIT students and alum will understand], the radiation of our sun, etc.). All of my life I have seen time from the side that says that the present has always passed and is in memory; I wonder if it is possible to see time from the other side of the duality.
There is a part of me that would like to know what it is to see the present as something that always is, if it was even for just a brief moment. There is another part of me, a stonger part of me, that worries that if I ever experienced such a moment it would be so spectacular that I would spend the rest of my life seeking to relive it. That last sentence made me wonder something perhaps a little more frightening, if one managed to see the present as something that always is, it might not be possible to return to seeing the present as something that’s always passed or it might be too glorious to ever return. Of course, it’s probably better not to be frightened by the idea, but it’s probably good not to search for it either.
So, in short, time’s funny and I have a real distate for mosquitos.