The Wedding Photo of Time

Time had a lonely childhood. It was her nature that was to blame. Always on the peripheral and an eternal partner to any continuum she was never where things dallied. Where time led others followed but she always moved ahead. Time had one friend but it was imaginary. Awareness was time’s dream but like all other things this dream got left behind, outgrown. Time was very thin, so thin you didn’t notice her so she didn’t take a good photograph, just a fleeting image with little captured.

It was in Time’s wedding photo that Awareness shone for it was in her presence that time was first sensed by others. The photo had been hard to get, many had claimed it would be impossible since awareness was imaginary. The real problem they said was that awareness could only be there if time could be both where she was and where she is but that wasn’t her nature. They argued that awareness requires two different times each of which knows what happens in the other. If so then one of these knows the future and awareness must therefore know itself before it is.

But others challenged this, they argued that it was only true if time’s path is straight and each step trodden is new. If instead time is a bubble growing bigger at every point then it is not passed between points but spread thinner by its growing. It is a bubble and all time is one connected to the boundary-space it touches. Awareness then can be real since it is the tension that unites that bubble. The image seen is not of time itself but a reflection of what it encloses.

Some took this idea further claiming time was not a single bubble but an infinite fractal where expansion of one bubble from inside another links time from the first moment to the last. ‘Look’, they claimed ‘see these lives built one upon the other. See inside one, each holds the image of all time. Look at anything created in time and you see the bubbles that unite it. The life of any system, living or not, will give us the photo of all time. Her wedding is at her birth, at her death and whatever space you choose there, you will find her.'