The Time Quandary

Where was your consciousness all those years before you were born? Can you describe the feeling of not yet existing? What did you perceive? Was there a color associated with that time?... Or was it just nothing?

How can you describe something when its main characteristic is that it really is nothing?

I can still recall my first memory, vividly. It was a dynamic battle between a mythical, fiery-winged creature and myself. Our arena was a gigantic, odorless trash compactor (like the one in Star Wars). The beast soared from wall to wall as I tried taking it down with my retractable metal claws.

I should mention this was a dream, and in retrospect, I realize we were taking on the personas of trademarked characters, but that's how my life started.

I was 3.

My first solid memory of the real world was when I was a toddler, standing in the kitchen with my mother. I asked her her name. She told me. I responded with "What's dad's name?" She told me. I started seeing them as people, rather than long-term babysitters.

For some reason, I felt like I've been alive forever. As a child, I just assumed life was eternal. The thought of something as obscure as an 18-wheeler crashing through our house and crushing me just never crossed my mind.

...I don't know why it would.

Then I learned that life had an arc. Raised with a religious mindset, I figured that our spirits were alive even before we were conceived. I thought our souls were sitting in a waiting room up in Heaven, reading magazines until our number's called and we were sent down to Earth where our parents were expecting us, like they designed 3D models of our faces and ordered them from the Heaven store.

Whether or not we have souls, from a scientific standpoint, I can safely say we're born and eventually develop thoughts and memories. So where and when do our lives begin, really?

To those of you who say time is an illusion, or that it's not real, listen to this-- everything in life is dependent on time: catching the bus, the beat of a song, even pacing a joke just right so it's funny and not uncomfortable. You can meet the love of your life because you were late for work, or get mugged for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Time is a cruel and generous mistress.

Here's my philosophy on age-- we're as old as the beginning of time up until our last second alive. What does that mean? According to my philosophy, you and I are older than George Washington, King Tut, Lao Tzu, pretty much anyone born and dead before our time, no matter how old we are when we die. The reason is that if time is linear, and there really was a first moment in the universe, that first moment up until the end of your life constitutes how long you lasted, because it includes the time you didn't exist, all the time you could have existed, and your lifespan itself (imagine the universe's first moment as a shared birthday by everyone and everything that came after it).

So, what does that mean? Well, George Washington died at the age of 67 in 1799 A.D. If another guy dies at the age of 42 in 2020 A.D., the younger guy may not have lived as long, but if you compare their timelines from day one of the universe, the young man's timeline stretched further, so the young man is really older in relation to the universe.

This is all assuming, of course, that time is linear. If it's cyclical and just keeps resetting itself, I don't know what to tell you.