Coming home

Hi Reader,

Imagine with me for a moment.

Imagine that this moment is like a single frame in the film of reality. That the past isn’t done and gone and the future isn’t just a now-imaginary thing that will someday arrive, but that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously in some level of reality that’s beyond time. Or, no, not beyond—a level of reality that contains time.

Imagine that in the same way the universe contains matter but is not made of matter, reality is not happening within time, but instead contains time. We humans can’t experience it this way, of course. But just imagine with me.

In this reality, your life, past, present, and future, is already written. Everything you’ve ever done—everything you remember doing—you are in fact doing right now, just somewhere else (or somewhen else). Everything you will ever do is the same, happening right now, just elsewhen/elsewhere. This present moment is no more nor less real than any other moment of your life—even though you may not be able to see those other moments. If it helps, think of it the way you think of whatever is around the corner from you right now. You can’t see it, but it’s still there. Yes, in our imagined reality, all times other than what we usually call “now” are really just “around the corner.”

Now imagine that instead of a human, you’re some kind of being that lives in the part of reality that contains time. To beings like us… let’s see, we should give ourselves a name to make this easier to talk about. To beings like us chrono sapiens, the time stream is just that: a stream. Same as homo sapiens-you or I would perceive a stream of water: an apparently fixed phenomenon that is also constantly moving and changing. In other words, simultaneously perceptibly static and perceptibly dynamic.

For fun, we chrono sapiens like to dip our heads in the time stream. It’s refreshing! When we do, our awareness drops into the head of some random homo sapiens, and we experience their life, exactly like you and I (our non-imaginary homo sapiens selves) experience our lives. From start to finish, infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood to elderhood to death, or something shorter than that in the case of accident or illness. In fact, for the duration of this dip in the time stream, chrono sapiens completely forget that we have an existence outside our time-bound homo sapiens life.

When our homo sapiens avatar dies, we raise our heads, dripping, from the time stream, smiling to our friends, knowing that the life we just experienced isn’t gone. Remember, in this imaginary reality time is static. All those moments are still there, and could easily be experienced again and again and again. In fact, if we use a familiar term for this reality-that-contains-time-but-is-not-timebound—eternity—it seems inevitable that any given human life will be experienced an infinite number of times by various chrono sapiens.

That’s the end of our little imagination excursion. I’ll say two things about it:

First, I wonder what impact it would have on the way I lived my life if I lived as if this imaginary situation were real. For instance, it seems obvious I’d be less afraid. But would I be more, or less, compassionate? More selfish, or more generous? At least for now, I don’t have whatever capacity it would take to analyze that, but I think there’s something valuable to consider here, and I’d invite you to consider it. It’s this:

It seems likely that the imagined metaphysics I just came up with isn’t real. I don’t have access to the right sorts of information (or the right amounts of information) to know that. But here’s the key: nobody does. Nobody knows anything about the nature of reality. It’s a total mystery.

I spent a lot of years living inside an imagined reality whose nature someone else told me all about, every Sunday in church. The thing is, when I was living in that reality, I couldn’t see the fact that reality as a whole is a total mystery, because I thought I understood it. Of course all I actually understood was the imagined reality.

Now, I don’t regret that. There’s no problem with it. I had to go through it in order to get to where I am now. So I’m grateful, actually.

But now that I see that reality is a bottomless mystery, I no longer have to defend the borders of my imagined reality. Instead, I’m free to take responsibility for the one thing I might actually have some control over: my life.

And, look at this: in sharp contrast to the fact that nobody knows anything about the nature of reality, there is no greater expert on my life than me. So my best course of action in living a life of fulfillment/joy/hedonism/gluttony/whatever-it-is-I-actually-want is to find my own voice, and listen to it. Way more deeply than I listen to anyone else.

Of course that doesn’t mean I don’t seek out wisdom and advice from others who have more experience than me in some area. And it doesn’t mean I don’t consider the wants and needs of the people who are in my life. It just means the ultimate responsibility for what I choose to do with my life falls to me.

I want to say here and now that I’ve spent enough years of my life avoiding that responsibility. I’m taking it back.

So the first point is this: you are the best person to determine how your life be. I would that you listen to yourself first and best of all. ((Sic) for those two sentences. Some of this stuff doesn’t language very well.)

The second thing is this:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt an undercurrent of sadness. In part it’s for the way this moment and all its beauty and magic are constantly passing away, disappearing into the past, never to be seen or experienced again. Maybe this wistful sadness is behind my little imaginary reality earlier in this letter, in which the past need not be lost forever.

But I’ve been exploring that sadness lately, instead of my normal tendency to dismiss it as a weird quirk, I’m coming to see now that it’s actually a sign pointing right at what matters most to me.

Because the other reason for my sadness is that I feel like I used to know something that was the most important thing I could ever know, and I’ve forgotten it. It’s like there’s this deep longing to behold something, or connect with something, or melt into something, and I can’t quite put my finger on what that something is or what my relationship to it was.

The closest word I’ve found for this feeling is homesick. And in rare moments of openness, I find myself sobbing that, for a moment or someday, I get to experience coming home.

I see now that a big part of why I write is because I want to share that experience with you.