Some thoughts about the passing of time

On my ride home from work a while ago (certainly pre-pandemic) I noticed a Pride flag hanging from a building. Pride in Toronto is a month-long celebration, and it always makes me think of summer (which makes sense, as it's always in June, culminating in the parade around Canada Day weekend). The flag got me thinking how the Pride celebrations last for a month, and how long a month felt to me when I was younger. When I first travelled to Europe it was for a 6 week trip to study in Prague, and before I left it felt like I would be there forever. At the same time, waiting a month for something good felt like it would never come, "one month from now" being a point in time so distant in the future that it was hard to imagine what it would actually be like when it's here.

Shorter periods of time used to last longer as well. As a student I would sit in class, trying to pay attention to a lecture while periodically marking down the remaining minutes in my notebook. Sitting still for an hour? Impossible! For better or worse, when I was younger, “now” often felt like it would never end.

But as I get older I’m noticing that time is moving faster. It's not just my perception, it really is! It's like I'm gradually moving from the outside of the record to the inside - a year or a day used to seem so long that I could fit in all sorts of things, but now I just keep going around and around, faster and faster, and each rotation (a year, a week, a day) passes faster than the last. Any big event - Pride month, a trip to Europe, the Olympics - that has lots of build-up can occupy your time with planning and anticipation. Then, before you know it, it’s just another thing that happened to you and that you remember, because it’s already gone. In the same way, I used to dread Mondays. Now, I close my eyes for a moment, and just like that, it’s Friday again. This wouldn’t be so bad if the passing of each week didn’t mean I’ve also aged by a week - the workweek passing quickly I can handle. Another week of my life gone, never to return? That’s a different story.

Perceiving this constant movement of time is normal as we get older, so my observations are hardly unique. I think most people my age agree the days seem to be passing faster, but I don't know if we all agree as to why. Is it because one year out of forty is a smaller percentage of your life than one year out of twenty? Or is it because as we get older we tend to fall into routines of work or family where the days are more similar and they all blend together, our individual experiences too similar to each other to stand out and make the days feel like they're lasting longer than they are? I don't know.

Brainpickings has an excellent post on this. Quoting from Marc Whitman's Felt Time:

In order to feel that one’s life is flowing more slowly — and fully — one might seek out new situations over and over to have novel experiences that, because of their emotional value, are retained by memory over the long term. Greater variety makes a given period of life expand in retrospect. Life passes more slowly. If one challenges oneself consistently, it pays off, over the years, as the feeling of having lived fully — and, most importantly, of having lived for a long time.

I'm not in a position to claim this as a universal truth, but it certainly rings true for me, as my life has a more consistent daily routine than it ever did before. Regardless of the cause, the perception that time is moving faster can be difficult to accept. When time feels like it's moving slower, a day or a week or even a moment can last long enough to enjoy without worrying about its inevitable end. But as I realize time is constantly moving forward, I know that this moment or day or week, as great as it may be, will definitely end, and soon, and that leads to a kind of melancholy I never experienced in my youth. Awareness of impermanence can be a good thing when I'm sitting in a boring meeting at work, but it has the potential to lead to considerable sadness when I'm watching my kids play in the yard.

My understanding of time is changing as I age; again, it’s not really a unique experience, but like so many things it’s something you don’t think about (or even believe) until it starts happening to you.  When time moved slower it was easy to be fooled into seeing life as a series of moments that I could get lost in - when “now” lasted longer I didn’t notice the passing of the weeks and years.. But now I realize that time isn’t a series of moments so much as one constant motion that never stops.

A lot of my changing perception of this comes from Buddhist ideas on time and the impermanence of everything. As Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen teacher who did much to popularize Zen in North America, said, when asked to summarize Buddhism in only a few words: “Everything changes.” In Buddhism, the inability to accept that everything changes is what causes suffering - we become attached to things (people, situations, possessions) that are, by their very nature, impermanent, and subject to decay and that will eventually disappear (ourselves included!). And because we fail to recognize that change is constant, we can be unprepared when what we once loved grows or changes or disappears altogether. This is where meditation comes in as an essential part of Buddhist practice: by meditating, we can train our minds to stay more in the present moment instead of being distracted by memories of the past or anticipation of the future. You realize that each moment is in a sense eternity. It’s a weird feeling, but when it happens, it feels very real.

When our minds are thinking more about the past or the future than the present, we’re just lost in our own thoughts, which are still taking place right now. David Cain, on Raptitude, wrote that “Life is an experiential, right-now experience, and that’s it. We can speculate, remember, plan and fear, but those experiences too only happen here: between your ears, in this room, now and only ever now.” The truth is that, whether we realize it or not, we’re always living in the moment, and everything that has ever or will ever happen to us is happening right now, but sometimes we forget to notice the things happening outside of our heads. Doing this is a struggle for me, but I’ve found a combination of meditation and aging have certainly helped.

(I originally wrote this in 2018. I recently found the draft, and updated it with some minor changes before posting. If it matters.)

Why am I bothering to write on this blog anymore?

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and I'd like to get back to occasionally posting my thoughts in some kind of organized manner, but in the hopes of having a bit more focus, which will hopefully motivate me to write more, and more carefully, I've put together a brief description of what it is I'm aiming for on this blog. It's deliberately vague and hardly original, but that sums me up in real life, so there you go.

The purpose of this blog is to allow me to explore ideas about happiness, meaning, day-to-day life, and how to figure out what really matters in life. As David Cain at Raptitude puts it, I want to "get better at being human."

Reading has long been one of my favourite activities, but due to a lack of focus and uncertainty about exactly what I want out of life, I've failed to hold onto much of the wisdom I've come across over the years. This blog is an attempt to hold onto some of that wisdom by focusing my thoughts instead of just moving on to the next idea, activity, book or drink.

I'm partially inspired by the lyrics of George Harrison's Any Road:

And if you don't know where you're going
Any road will take you there 

I'm 40 now, and while I've managed to drag myself through grad school, and finding a career, I've never managed to figure out exactly what it is I actually want out of life. I've tended to swing back and forth over the decades between convenient options and naively idealistic plans that require more single-minded focus than I've ever been willing to pursue to the extent required for success. Well, that attitude and lack of focus has gotten me where I am.

I've been a fan of Buddhism for a while, and I'm interested in the concept of Enlightenment or Awakening. This is a point a person can reach, most commonly through years of meditation and study, where, essentially, shit doesn't bother you anymore. While I'm skeptical about the possibility of reaching full awakening, the evidence seems pretty clear to me that it's possible to move in that direction and become more, well, awake. This can be the result of meditation, which is something I think benefits me, but also through study of philosophy, history, literature, self-help books or just through living one's life and learning as we go.

I've had moments of realization in my life, where I suddenly realize something about myself or about the world, moments where suddenly a certain aspect of life becomes crystal clear. While I'm sure I've forgotten some of these, those moments I do remember and can hold onto and that contribute to how I live in the world are the moments that contribute to my growth as a person, and even, in tiny bits, the development of some semblance of wisdom as I get older. Through meditation and reading the thoughts of people with interesting things to say about life, I guess you could say my goal is to accelerate and build on that process of development and understanding, leading it into a direction of contentment and wisdom that, in my mind, would be in the same ballpark as the Buddhist concept of Awakening. And maybe by writing about it occasionally it'll help clarify those thoughts in my mind. That's the goal, at least.

A new blog post

In order to satisfy a disgruntled reader[ship], I am now adding a new blog post.

In order to maximize appeal, I am including a link to this interesting article about Norwegian Wood:

So she makes him sleep in the bath and then finally in the last verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian wood on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue in cheek. She led him on, then said, 'You'd better sleep in the bath'. In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.
- Paul McCartney

http://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/norwegian-wood-this-bird-has-flown/

Why I Raise My Children Without God

This post on CNN's iReport website was flagged by some readers as 'inapppropriate'. I read it because as an atheist myself I'm always interested in what other non-believers say about raising children. I'm bothering to post a link to it here because of the fact that it was flagged as inappropriate - not by CNN, but presumably by religious readers appalled at the idea of someone not lying to their own kids about there being a god out there who does whatever gods do. And worse, she tells her kids to be good and decent anyway, not just because they'll go to hell otherwise. Flagging such a simple blog post says a lot about the narrow-minded ignorance that comes along with religious faith - the belief that your god has given you and people like you a path to eternal bliss, and everyone else can (literally) go to Hell. It's not a good thing for a society to have people who think that way.

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282

There is no ultimate truth, no absolute to be understood, no "way". God is a construct of religion dependent on specific cultures, so cannot be taken as an expression of any absolute or truth - just one particular culture's idea of it. But just because no particular book or philosophy points to an ultimate truth does not mean we can't find help in the writings of others, writers or thinkers who have experienced and contemplated life experiences - usually painful, or difficult, which are the ones we need help with. To take the teachings of the Buddha, or any Zen master, or Jesus, or whoever, as the correct way to live life is a mistake, and can lead to problems, both personal and societal. But we can benefit by extracting some wisdom from their teachings that may offer insight into our current situation, or may alleviate our suffering a tiny bit, or help us better understand and deal with the difficulties of life.

Who is this God Person, Anyway?

I recently had a conversation/debate with someone who said he believed strongly in God. Not the Catholic God, not Allah (he's a lapsed Catholic) but his own, personal concept of a god that he was sure explained the creation of the universe better than any natural process possibly could. Due to the late hour and too much alcohol the conversation eventually went off topic and finally degenerated into broad merriment, but the subject of the conversation has been on my mind and is something I've been thinking about, which lead me to the question - what do people mean when they talk about "God"?

(Of course, this is a topic that deserves much more time and energy than I'm giving it here, but these are just some quick thoughts I'm putting down as a distraction from work, so bear with me.)

When people say they believe in God, generally there is a very specific God they're referring to, one who often appeared first in a holy book, or who is the central figure of a major organized religion. But occasionally you hear people refer to personal, new age, generic version of "God" they believe in. It's not the God of the Bible or Koran or the gods of the Bhagavad Gita, of course, because religion is just a cultural construct and God exists beyond any sort of man-made organization or human thought. Et cetera.

But here's the thing that people need to keep in mind, whether they think a god exists or not: God is a cultural construct. He does not exist outside of nature, or as part of nature - God "exists"  as much as he is a character in a book (or several books), and the "God" that people either do or don't believe in today can only be a specific God whose characteristics and history were written down and created by a particular culture as a product of a particular time and place. For a person to say she believes in a God that transcends all of this is to say she believes in a God as artificial and created as the gods of those ancient peoples she so correctly rejects. The only difference is that, in this case, she's the one doing the creating. A god produced from one individual's mind does not make that god any more real than Yahweh and his associates/rivals.

If you want evidence of the existence of a god, you have to find that evidence outside of your own head. Logic and arguments (ie, language) will never be sufficient, anymore than Darwin's Origin of Species on its own was sufficient to make the case for evolution - the evidence for evolution is out there, in the real world, inviting skeptics and the curious alike to go observe it for themselves. You'll find no such equivalent when it comes to God.

The nature of God is not understood in any universal way, even by believers in gods like those with the bestselling holy books. That in itself should raise eyebrows - if there's not universal agreement on the nature of God, then either one religion is right and the rest are wrong, or they're all wrong. But God, being a cultural artifact, of course, doesn't actually exist, s impossible for any one person to actually know. If they claim to, they're making it up.

(Title of this post taken from a book title referred to in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Life, the universe, and atheism

I met my friend J. for a pint last night, and at one point he asked me how central to my identity atheism is. It's a good question, and one I didn't have a ready answer for. I was raised Catholic, and stopped practicing more than 10 years ago, but didn't really think of myself as an atheist until the past few years. J. was raised more or less without religion, so I did say that, basically, having been raised with religion, atheism is a bigger deal to me than it is to him. He agreed with this, and the conversation then moved on to other things. But the question has been on my mind, so I thought it might be worth blog post to look at how central being an atheist is to my identity.

I became an atheist over time - there was no eureka moment of sudden clarity. It had been years since I stopped believing in God or going to church (except with family on holidays) when I started considering myself an atheist. Looking back, I'd say there were a few things that converged in a relatively brief period of time, like starting to read science books, the appearance of the New Atheists, the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and, not long after, the build up to and birth of my own daughter. These are all things that combined to force me to think about what it is I really believe and know, and why.

Reading more science books filled in enormous gaps in my knowledge of nature and the universe, and that really didn't leave much for God to do in the universe, as far as I can see. But it was the birth of my daughter that really focused my thinking about religion. My wife is Jewish, and with overall a positive experience of being raised Catholic (though not practicing for several years), I tried to find ways to keep Catholicism as a part of my cultural identity. Being Jewish is an advantage here in that Jews can be atheists and still be Jewish. As Paul Giamatti said, "there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews".

Before conceiving, and during the pregnancy, we had several conversations about how to raise our child, and while trying to decide whether or not to baptize her (before I knew it was a her) I came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way to have a cultural baptism that is not also an expression of religious belief. I realized that I want to be honest with my daughter about the world, I want to be able to justify my decisions regarding both her life and my own, and it is easier to justify to myself and to her not having her baptized than making her a member of an organization with whose raison d'être I fundamentally disagree. So, in that way, in the sense that atheism colours and informs real life decisions that I make, I do have to say that atheism is a big part of my life and, probably, a big part of my sense of identity.

Of course, being an atheist is just a starting point - recognizing that God does not exist is essentially a matter of overcoming an inhereted cultural belief, but it's no more a statement about the universe itself than (to bring Richard Dawkins into it) recognizing that goblins and fairies don't exist. So while atheism, and my opinions on religion and science and all that, are a big part of my life, they don't exactly come up in conversation everyday. I think that's one important distinction to explain - calling yourself an atheist only tells people what you don't believe, and it says very little about what you actually do believe, or like, or enjoy doing in your free time.

To sum up, because being an atheist is something I'd say I've accomplished, through reading, thinking, and looking at the world, and being convinced of a godless universe after a religious upbringing (I'd say I'm symapthetic to Douglas Adams' "radical atheist" position) it's a small, personal intellectual accomplishment that I can even say I'm proud of.