We are creatures of time, of heartbeats, of solar rotations and lunar rotations all affected by things that, if we dedicate our human lives to it, we can only map partially. There are people who dedicate their lives to standing on the shoulders of previous giants, peering further into the murky depths of our reality. And then we have others, dedicating their lives to attempting to assure that we as a species survive, while we have others that allow us to grapple with the uncertainty of being human.

What we do in time is interact. We interact with each other. We interact with our environment, be it moving stones or working collectively to visit the Moon. The harsh word here, the pat on the back there, the clearing of a drain or the tossing of refuse  in it – we all interconnect, and all of these things happen over time. How we grow. How we change. How we do these things as individuals, and how we do these things as societies, and how we do these things as a species.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK7BLceskus?list=PL40A777E4503B0F3A]

We measure ourselves by time, but when we die time no longer exists for us and we become summarized by the universe in the actions we took and didn’t take. A life well intended is not always well spent, where we might think we’re doing something good when, generations later, we find that it was wrong. We make the best decisions we can with the information we have and, if we are intelligent, we know we don’t have all the information – that we’re just winging it. And if that bothers us, we look to comfort rather than answers. Fragile, we’re so fragile.

Remove time; that we are living or dead only matters to us – no one else, nothing else, we are the ants under the child’s magnifying glass at most and the ant you don’t see while walking around. We are affected by things that we do not understand and we affect things that we do not understand.

Without time, we simply used energy to use energy.

Without time, we are nothing, and with time, we become nothing. We are agents of change on the things around us.

We are as real as the wind; alone we are nothing, together we are a passing breeze on the universe, a force of nature. Temporary permutations of particles looking for meaning in a universe that has already defined us.