Time.

Time.

Time has been making less and less sense to me lately.

Why are we so hung up on the notion that we're being whisked along some linear path from what was to what is to what will be? The clock is ticking, but it doesn't mean anything is going anywhere. Things are growing, deteriorating, and rebuilding, but rather than moving forward through their progression, everything is essentially static, changing only in form. Or if not completely static, then certainly only moving cyclically.

The cycle necessarily means change, but that change doesn't equal progress in the big picture in the way we want to believe it does. Eventually the snake will run out of ways to twist and will have to eat its own tail. Nothing really passes us by, but just builds and breaks, endlessly.

500 years from now, when every atom of my organic being as been reabsorbed by the earth and disseminated to become a part of plants, animals and other humans, will I have any progress along the time continuum to my credit? No. The atoms which comprise me at the end of my life will compost on top of the very same atoms which used to be mine in childhood. I will have been spawned, stood up and fallen down, but not have run anywhere.

20 billion of what once were William Shakespeare's atoms are at work in us (that's me and you too) every day. Is he really history?

In the cosmos, time moves faster and slower than it does on Earth, and if we were advanced enough to spend more time there, we'd be willing to loosen our grip on our concept of the passage of time as something separate from our spatial mobility. Billions of years into the future after the sun has blinked out and lost its grip on the Earth, and we've finally bumped into something massive enough to absorb, re-fuse and expel our matter and energy in completely different forms, we will never have existed as far as the cosmos are concerned (not that the universe ever cared for us in the first place).

X number of years into the future, will you actually be somewhere else, or just be something else? Sure you'll be somewhere else if you pack up and move to Amsterdam or Sudan, but even then you'll only have moved sideways, not forward.