Time and Camelot

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

A smile from a veil?

Do you think you can tell?

  -Pink Floyd,  Wish you Were Here

Lately I have been thinking about the nature of time. I suppose it is a natural thing to be a bit preoccupied with given my relative lack of it. Whatever the motivation, the subject fascinates me. I have spent time trying to understand it as a physical phenomenon, Time, it seems, can be stretched, it can be compressed but the arrow of time always points in the same direction.

The physical aspects of time,  while fascinating, has really only one feature that really affects the human experience of time:  the arrow. On a day to day level time is constant, it neither slows nor speeds except in our heads. We and everything we know exist on the bleeding edge of time, an unspeakably profound mystery we take for granted every moment of every day.

Now humans, like any animal, are designed for survival which tends to skew our perception. We tend to be threat oriented which biases our perception and can leave us quite stressed at any given moment. It is particularly interesting because after enough time has passed nostalgia takes over and what may have seemed a  particularly stressful time might have something in it that becomes a cherished memory.

In my own life there are a few years that stand out like no other period, roughly 2001 to 2012. For me those years are Camelot. I ruled  with my queen and we adventured with our young knights. Now just like the real Camelot things weren't perfect, there were dragons to battle and barbarian invasions to repulse but we always found a way. Like, I suspect, the real Camelot it didn't feel much like a golden age at the time, but nostalgia has worked its magic. Those moments have passed, I am now just the broken fisher king.

   ...         

 I sat upon the shore

 Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

...

-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

In the end all anyone has is the present moment and the possibilities moving from one moment to the next presents you with. Choice is what makes you alive and so much more than anything else in the universe, the ability to choose how to put your possibilities together. As my own possibilities become more and more limited my ability to partake in life's  activities… work…  self care…  food...  drink...  sex...  I become less and less alive and the gift of each moment becomes more starkly apparent. Every one of us builds our lives moment by moment, sometimes our options are pretty limited, but even now, for me every one is a gift.

That brings me back to Camelot and on to my final thought for today, one which I offer without proof. Every moment is eternal, existing somewhere like a bubble in spacetime. My Camelot still thrives somewhere just out of touch and always will.