Published December 30, 2018
Today I started to type 2018 on my phone’s Twitter app and inadvertently typed 2010, then looked at those digits and was reminded again that we’re eight years past when I moved to Oregon. A whole new life began unfolding in the Pacific Northwest. And yes, I noticed that 2010 is far enough in the past that it isn’t included in the image above.
I’m decades removed from high school and the class that introduced me to the concept that time does not exist. Peter Stubbs drew a horizontal line on the chalkboard, calling it the x axis, representing time in the way we typically think of it. He then put plot points, markers of events, on that line, and through one of them, he drew a long vertical line he called the y axis. He explained the idea that for each plot point on the x axis, that moment in time was still happening — something he described in more detail as the everlasting now.
It was a lot for a high school junior to process. Predictably, we tried to use this to our advantage. “If time doesn’t exist, then I don’t necessarily have to finish that paper that’s supposed to be due tomorrow, right?” We were as successful with that approach as you probably imagine.
Never before for me has time seemed so complicated as it does now. Reconnecting last night with someone from high school did a number on my sense of time and place. Also, thanks to 24/7 connectivity, toxic news cycles and their ubiquity on social media, 2018 has felt like far more than one year. And yet, 2010 doesn’t feel like eight years ago. In other ways, it’s a lifetime ago. Then there’s the line, author unknown, repeated often lately on Twitter: Next week has been exhausting.
If time does not exist, then maybe I haven’t really been sleeping so much of it away because of 2018 fatigue?
We are almost done with two zero one eight, and yet, maybe we never will be. That’s one hell of a collection of everlasting nows.
At some point, I hope to put into words some of what 2018 meant to me, and to look ahead to 2019, but for now, I mostly wanted to acknowledge how close we are from moving from one into the other. As everlasting as now can be, it’s also fleeting, at least in the sense that I soon have to be at work. The “time does not exist” concept holds no sway there either, what with daily newspaper deadlines and whatnot.
Oh, and when my big thumbs went to type 2019 in that same tweet earlier, it came out as 3029. Make of that what you will. I’ll be trying to imagine something pithy Mr. Stubbs might have said about that.
Image by Gts/via Shutterstock.