Imagine that time is a road. If you look in one direction you see the past, and the other direction shows the future. The place on that road where you currently stand is the present. Take a moment and visualize this in your mind. OK.
The catch is, since the present is always moving, you are not actually standing on the road, but rather traveling on the road. And if time is a road, with the past in one direction that you have already seen, and the future in the other direction that you haven’t yet seen, it’s as if you are traveling the backward down the road, facing the past.
The events you experience become fixed in your mind when they happen. They become known. They are recorded in your recent memory. As time progresses, you watch the events as they recede farther and farther down the road into the horizon of the past. By contrast, the future is unknown. You haven’t see it yet. Unlike events of the past, which you mentally recorded and your continue to see in your memories, you are blind to the future. The past is in front of you, and the future is behind you. As you travel, you travel backward into the future.
How did you get here to this moment in your life? The events of the past converged to create the present, of course, and they converge with new present events to create the future. Your future is built on events of your past. Your future will be built on your previous actions and your current actions. You are currently reading these words. How may these words help you to shape your future? You don’t know yet.
The future is unknowable until it becomes the present, and at that point it is not only knowable, but actually known. The future reveals itself to you moment by moment. Each future moment becomes a present moment, and then, just as quickly, it becomes a past moment. Tick, tick, tick, the future approaches you, reaches reaches you, and passes you without so much as a tip of the hat or a wave of the hand. The future is happening now.
Here it is.
Right now.
Oops! It just happened. Now it’s the past.
Surfers know this well. Precariously balanced on the surfboard, no two moments are exactly identical. Each wave is different, propelling the surfer with a singular combination of intensity, direction, intersecting cross-currents, and adornments of wind and light and temperature, creating unfolding opportunities for balance and emerging threats of imbalance. Each moment reveals itself in a combination of predictability and surprise. And when the wave finally crashes on the shore, it becomes part of the surfer’s lived experience, only to be followed by the next wave that is just beginning to be formed far out in the deep ocean.
In certain situations, time is the elements that transports something from its current state of being to some new state of being. In certain situations, all the conditions for this development are in place, but the development itself needs to progress and emerge in due course. The oak tree has rings in its trunk that show it has lived 100 years. An acorn falls from this tree down to the forest floor where it mingles with the leaves and is driven by the wind until it comes to rest for the winter. When it sprouts in the springtime and takes root, the conditions are in place and all that’s needed is the passing of the seasons for it to become a tree. “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.” The singular link is nothing more than the passage of time.
Time causes water to solidify if the surrounding temperature is cold enough or causes it to vanish if the temperature is hot enough.
Time allows some tiny things to grow into giant things. Think of a time-lapse film that shows the evolution of a tiny green sprout budding from soil, reaching up towards the sun with leaves unfurling and blossoming into a majestic flower. Think of another film of a flat city block where excavators dig a deep crater and trucks pour concrete, cranes and scaffolding spring from the pavement and crews build a skyscraper that casts shadows over the neighborhood.
Time also reduces some ominously large things to dust. Think of the time-lapse photo of a carcass that decays, slowly at first, and then erupts into a frenzy of accelerated deconstruction. Time is the element that converts a beautiful mansion on a hill to smoldering embers.
Time turns night to day and day to night and spring to summer to autumn to winter. Time makes leap years periodically appear. With conditions just right, time made the Grand Canyon and the Great Lakes and the world’s deserts. With conditions just right, time turns coal into diamonds.
Einstein said, “Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.” Compounding derives its power from the calendar. A single day provides just a minuscule puff of power, hardly perceptible, like the movement of the minute hand of the clock. The buildup of many single days, however, increases the power of compounding. Eventually as weeks turn to months and months turn to years, compounding increasingly compounds itself and the growth trajectory becomes ever steeper with every new page of the calendar.
Farmers know this. You plant seeds in springtime, and by fall, if you are lucky, you have crops to harvest. In the first growing season, one kernel of corn could produce a corn stalk bearing one ear of corn with 600 kernels. In the second growing season, if those kernels were planted, they could produce 600 ears with 600 kernels each, for a total of 360,000 kernels. In the third growing season, those kernels produce 216 million kernels, and in the fourth season, you would have 130 billion kernels. All from a single kernel of corn 48 months earlier.
If you repeated the exercise for a total of seven growing seasons, you would have 28 billion billions of kernels or corn, which not only is an impossibly large amount of corn to imagine, but is also more corn that actually exists in the world. In fact, it is even more corn than would exist if the world was actually made of corn. If each kernel was 0.2 cubic centimeters, and you wanted to put all 28 billion billion kernels into a square container, each side of your container would need to be roughly 21,000 miles long, or more than three times the distance from New York to Tokyo. It’s a good thing that you eat most of the corn you are given rather than planting it.
This illustrates the power of time, when applied to the right set of conditions, to be a singular link.
P.S., What would happen if you suddenly converted the whole planet Earth to corn? I’m talking about actually changing the current composition of the Earth to corn, in the same way we might imagine the moon is made of blue cheese.
Well, let’s think about that for a moment.
The planet would have considerably less mass, which would cause its orbit around the sun to change. Its interactions with the other planets in the solar system would play a role, leading to perturbations in the Earth’s trajectory. The sun’s massive gravitational force might exert such an overwhelming pull on our lightweight planet of corn that we would be pulled ever closer to the sun’s nuclear furnace, closer and closer, until one fateful day in space, our planet of corn would meet its end in a single, sudden, walloping, buttery “Pop!”
In other words, if one day you turned the whole Earth into corn, time would take care of the rest.