Time

“…Time like an ever rolling stream,

bears all its sons away,….”  -  Isaac Watts.

This old Philosophy Professor was always fond of ending his lectures on Metaphysics by saying:

"As we push headlong through the curtain of the unknown that we call future, we carry all our times with us. We carry with us a vast load of our past experiences and those we have inherited from our ancestors.  Every future becoming present along the way, we add to our load until that time the load becomes too much for our inevitable frailty.  Since we will come to a place we can no longer carry the load, we must leave it to those who are younger and stronger, who will then pick up the load and carry on.  So you see, as we move on, we not only carry the past with us, but we collect the future to add to the burden of our descendents. Fortunately for us, yet unfortunately for our descendents, in the Now, we never can see beyond the horizon of our own existence to observe that tremendously large burden we will place on our children, and they on theirs. Therefore, it behooves us to push on into the future lightly with a cautious timidity, lest we make the burden we leave behind unbearable.  For the goal we seek can only be to leave to our descendents a burden with which they might be able to carry on into a farther future. Yet, we only come to realize this metaphysics of temporal existence, when the burden becomes extremely heavy, and we are near to the place where we will lay our load aside."

Curious isn’t it that time for us seems to move towards the future, or should I say we sentient beings feel ourselves moving towards what is to come.  So our experience of the arrow of time is directed towards (points to) the future.  But, if time is something real and not ideal or merely relational (earlier, later, simultaneous), then what was future becomes present (now) and will become, some time from that now, past.  So it would seem that time itself is bidirectional.  We experience its flow as from our past, through the now, to an ever new future. But time itself moves towards us and our experienced now.  What was once to come, becomes present (now) and will become past.

Time is indeed a curious thing.  So I offer my readers this post as something to think about.  We ought to think, it is what makes us real beings; it is our very essence.  But we change and move from where we were, to where we will be, while time moves from what was possible (future may be), to what is actual (now) and from hence to what is necessarily so - or what was and cannot be other than what it has been (past).