Time and Fireflies

As I write this, the solar year 2022 is coming to a close. No use spending time reviewing events in a short journal entry. Better to wax poetic on what a year actually means in the grand scheme of things. Not much. A year is a small blip on the radar screen of what we call linear time. From the standpoint of our earth, estimated to be 4.54 billion years old (plus or minus about 50 million years), 365 days barely weigh in.

This is good to keep in mind when we find ourselves experiencing any kind of mental, physical, or spiritual challenge. Those moments of difficulty are only micro blips on the radar screen of geological history—or even a human life span. Although our pain and afflictive emotions seem to have a life of their own and sometimes seem to last forever, they are pretty insignificant. Buddha recognized the temporary insanity of clinging to any experience when it is nothing more than a hiccup.

Those hiccups have driven the creation of a plethora self-help books, psychologies, religions, neurological research, etc. Humans are in constant search of the magic therapy, belief, or pill, to assuage our personal or cultural angst. It’s a wonder we have survived as a species with all our dramas. I wonder what it would be like to be sentient beings without suffering our imagined separateness, the ego identity that seems to disregard time scales and change. 

I suppose we would all blink our eyes, blinded by the unfiltered light, and the world would disappear. No need to engage in a play that has no substance. We would collectively awaken to the dreamlike moments of perception and cooperate with the rhythms of nature encoded in our cells since the dawn of humanity. I have always wondered if we would shift to another plane of existence, a parallel reality, and continue to work with energies outside our sentient experience.

Of course, we can experience this now, in this precious moment. We are capable of merging with the energies of the quantum field where all possibilities exist all the time. Time actually ceases as a limitation. After all, a year comes and goes on a line of our own creation. If we stop fixating on time would time exist, would “I” exist?  On an absolute level, this moment is all that will ever be—myriad worlds arising and disappearing like fireflies dancing in a night sky.