We live through time physically #

Our relationship with time #

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow #

Physically, we cannot shift in time. We are tethered to this moment, even as this moment is an everchanging progress point being logged into the universe and rippling out to affect the potentials-states of an ever-expanding group of living beings.

Squash a roach, and maybe the next person (cohabitor, neighbor, future-occupant) won’t be startled. Or maybe that roach is part of a larger whole working to create a new civilization/infestation and you thwarted its progress a tiny bit. Maybe the removal of that roach meant a little less future-delight for your pet, who would have played with it during their night patrol in a few days or weeks. 

Regardless of the potentials-states, the roach is now squashed. It can’t do what it could have done, affecting the future in its absence less than it would have as a living force. What once lived still had some impression on the world, and in greater or lesser degrees the effects of its existence need to ripple out until the void is filled.

Restated: the roach lived. It did some things that we don’t understand well enough to posit its fundamental interconnectedness. Then, we do something: we kill the roach. Whoops, that moment is gone, and now as much a part of history as the roach’s ramblings through the world until it’s death. Now we move forward, future-sensing some fear (infestation?) some delight (no more roach!) and mostly thinking about other things. We don’t think about how much our cat would have delighted in it.

All while other people are doing similar things, that could ripple out and affect our timeline. Things will pop into our timeline — that car swerving into our lane — that we must contend with. Some things we’ll create. In between is the continued physicalization of existence.

We can revisit what’s been done, but we can’t go back in time to redo it. We can’t unsquash the roach. We can only move forward from existing history.