Facebook is fond of reminding me what happened a year ago today, or two years or five years and this week I have found myself pondering the past. I was reflecting that fifty years ago in May I was about to sit my A-levels.   Forty years ago in May I gave birth to my first child. Thirty years ago in May we moved to our brand new house having enjoyed seeing it being built. Two years ago in May my husband was in the final weeks of his life.  These are just a selection of life’s landmark moments triggered by the month of May. They all have deep significance and can be conjured up in memory with delight, nostalgia, sadness and gratitude.

Time is such a strange thing. It feels so very real and we have this sense of moving in a  linear way through our lives.  Yet physicists seem to disagree on the extent to which it exists. Is it ‘real’?!  I am no physicist and although from ‘time to time’ I have found myself dabbling in the ideas of quantum physics I cannot make claim to any meaningful understanding  of it! Perhaps what I do understand is that when you start exploring the quantum world it seems to begin to reveal quite a different understanding of the nature of matter and of ‘reality’.

Clock time can tell me that I really ought to be up and out of bed. It can tell me that I have an appointment in half an hour and  should be in the car by now. If I ignore this and say that time does not exist that would be quite ridiculous!   There is also that curious sense of time held in the body.  Circadian rhythms are inbuilt and so important. I do seem to have become more of a night owl. I tell myself to go to bed earlier but so often it is well after midnight when my light finally goes out. If I get up early it can take me half the morning to come round. 8.30am feels about right!

There is also that sense we can have of either time flying or dragging.  Generally when you are really enjoying yourself time seems to fly. When you are stuck in a queue with nothing to do a minute can seem like an hour. Forty years ago when I was expecting my first baby each day felt like a week! So our perception of time is not fixed. And then there are those few occasions when you really want to stop time because the moment is just so perfect; but even in that moment of perfection you know it will pass

But as I sit here, now ,looking at the computer and at the books on my desk there is a curious sense of no time.  It is now. This  moment. Then as soon as I have registered this moment it has gone and it is a new moment. Now, now, now……. In many ways time is related to our perception of things changing. But would it exist if there were no conscious beings who were perceiving?  Is it rather an intrinsic part of our consciousness? I really do not know the answer, but I do enjoy engaging with the question!! 

As you get older there is this curious sense that you have less time and yet in many ways that is an unhelpful perspective. Is a longer life a fuller life, a richer life, a better life? Perhaps the key is to aim to live ‘outside time’ as much as possible. To use it for practicalities  but otherwise to set it aside. On a more mundane yet equally mysterious level the ‘past’ continues to exists in our memory. I can conjure up the young woman hoping for good A-level results and that university place. In memory I can vividly re-live the experience of giving birth and barely comprehend that it happened forty years ago. I know that although the form of my husband is no longer here he continues to be deeply present and a part of me through memory and imagination. In some ways I am also living in the future. When my husband was so very ill I longed for the illness to be over. But that feeling was so conflicted as an end to the illness  also meant an end to his life.  I imagined a future without him. I am in that future now.

Yet when all these things happened it was always now. It is always now. Nothing happens out of the now.    So very curious……….