In the Ending of Time | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, April 16, 2023

(Golden Age of Gaia)

April 15, 2023

…time is different now
and dawn is different too…
you are waiting
to see what direction you should face and if
you were born in time or was it wasted…
~Gerald Stern, In Time



What is a world without time? What is life without a schedule?

Imagine never looking at a clock again, never wondering if I’ll make it to an appointment on time, never seeing noon or 6 PM and thinking, it’s time for lunch, it’s time for dinner…

What would life be like without the human concept of time, without bowing to it as an unacknowledged overseer of our every move?

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I’m quite certain there are cultures and societies, remote and largely uninterfered with, who are already there, cradled within timelessness, daylight and dark and seasons their partners and companions in fluidly organizing their existence. Time doesn’t dictate to them. Perhaps they arise with the sun in the morning. When hunger strikes, they eat. There’s no such thing as a calendar, a clock, an appointment.

Such an existence, such a culture, would likely be deemed unworkable to the Western viewpoint. And yet, I wonder if some version of that timelessness is in our near future?

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Even the concept of “near future“ wouldn’t be the same in that future time. It’s been said that everything is happening simultaneously. Past and future coexist with present.

The only way I can vaguely comprehend this notion is the analogy of reading a book. I hold the book in my hand. I open it at random. That page is the present. The pages before are the past, and the pages after are the future. But they are all pressed together, cheek by jowl within the covers of that book.

Maybe when time as we know it disappears, our expanded vision will simultaneously see every word in that book, every moment and all the times there are, at once. And we won’t implode from the overload.

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The other comparison that helps me visualize this is to stretch my imagination to childhood. The ghostly memories of creating cardboard sleds and tobogganing down the hills of golden grass, summertime in Lafayette, only being recalled to the strictures of time when the cowbell would ring in the distance and we knew dinner was about ready.

I wonder if children of Western cultures are allowed such luxury, such freedom, nowadays? I suspect that such luxury and freedom vanished decades ago. And what a pity that is, that even the very young may not escape the chains of time.

But soon, soon… Soon we will know, and be able to accept, that time is a fiction. Despite apparent evidence such as deterioration, dissolution, death, time is not the cause or the culprit. I feel that time has been made scapegoat to cover the truths that humanity has been prevented from knowing. The endlessness of our beings. The eternity that imbues our soul selves.

The fact that the young girl sliding gleefully down that golden hillside exists simultaneously with the 60-something being writing these words, and the future being, sparkled with crystal lights and bearing wings as translucent as fairy dust.

We are all “me,“ and I can’t wait to reconcile these fractions and fragments and encompass the enormity of what I am, what we all are.