Time

This thought has been baking for almost a week now, ever since I saw the movie The Man From Earth. I recommend this movie to everybody, everywhere, ever. It's a really, really good movie that, at least to me, as a viewer, forced some hard questions. It came out in 2007, so it should be pretty easy to find a copy, too. It's a movie about a man who tells his friends he's 14 000 years old. To tell more would spoil the surprises. Watch it.

We're going to step outside the bounds of everyday reality now and do a bit of a thought exercise. Create a world, just like ours, and put yourself in it. Now, for yourself, create a friend. I believe it would work better if this friend would be an adult, but it's not a must. Your friend you've made here is a real friend, a true persona that you genuinely like. Your friend, after you've known him for a few years, seems like one of those ageless people: his/her looks might change, but you can't really tell what age he/she is, or see any real signs of aging.

After you've known for a score of years, you start to become certain: your friend doesn't age, or atleast doesn't seem to. You grow older, while he/she seems to, atleast outwardly, stay the same age. Maybe ten, or twenty years from the day you met, your friend seems the same as ever, fit as a fiddle, still as ageless as the day you met, while for you time marches ever onwards. Would you believe the evidence of your own eyes or discard it as a mere curiosity? What if your friend confirmed it? Could you not be envious? Could you keep the cold touch of enmity and the feeling of unfairness from affecting your relationship, knowing that while you grow older and will eventually die your friend will forever stay the same? If you couldn't, would you wish for your friend to not have this ability or would you wish you had the same trait? Would you wish it only for yourself, or for both of you?

Now imagine, if you can, yourself ageless. Seasons, decades and centuries pass and you flow through it all like water in a stream. How would it change you, to see time pass you by? Everyone you know leaves this world in what might, after a while, seem like quite the hurry, while you are outwardly ever the same. How could you keep yourself from jading, from simply stopping to care? Or would you view yourself as apart, different enough to not be forced to care at all? Would you have to, to be able to hold on to sanity? Or would you lapse into inaction or reclusion, unable or unwilling to act in a world that passes you by? Would you try to change things, make a difference, given all the time in the world?

The philosopher in me thinks these questions important. However, I find myself unable to give a satisfying answer to any of these questions: I can simply wonder and make assumptions, play little games in my mind where I act one way or the other. As often happens with such palaces of thought, I am not certain of how things would turn out in reality. I create differentiating "truths", a juxtaposition, and try to create an absolute. This is where I fail: second guessing comes to me by nature. There is no perfect stance, no given answer simple enough to encompass it all. This complexity of thought leaves me a bit rattled at times, but the grey between white and black is probably better than either absolute.

It seems I digress: the sleeplessness of too hot summer nights makes my mind run in circles. Thus, in closure, if I should give a reason to the barrage of questions arrayed here, I suppose it would be relativity to other humans. How would you relate - how could you relate - if there was a dividing factor so pervasive as to affect every aspect of the whole? As I, rather spaciously, pointed out in the previous paragraph, I don't know. This, to me, makes the question ever more interesting. A question you already have an answer for does little to grow you as a person.