Time as the Three Phases of Water
A common metaphor is to see time as a river, with the present as a tiny marker that floats forward with the stream from the past into the future. Our calendars do the same, a marker for today, and the entries for yesterday and tomorrow look the same.
This linear image was also my concept of time until about fifteen years ago, when I started questioning it. The same metaphor can’t represent the future, the past, and the present because they are fundamentally different. So, I changed my image of time from a stream of water to the three phases of water. Looking at time as an ice factory that transforms water vapour into ice, and right at the transition between vapour and ice is a brief moment of liquid water, the now.
To explore my new idea further, I turned it into an art exhibition. Luckily, as a nature photographer, water in all phases had been one of my favourite motifs for years, and I had thousands of close-ups of ice, clouds, lakes, and rivers. People came and watched the exhibition, and we talked about time. It was heart-warming to hear people changing their relationship to time:
– Oh, my past is frozen. I can stand on the solid ice, look down, see my past, and change how I value it. Letting go of the idea that I somehow could change it. Letting go of all my “what ifs …”.
– Yeah, my future is not as determined by my past as I thought. The future is moving like water vapour. Chaotic and in unexpected ways. I’m freer than I thought. Well, that is both liberating and scary.
– Now, and now, and now. This strange moment where everything happens. I can’t act in the future nor in the past. Only now. What is this mysterious, liquid now, anyway?
Our Past is Frozen Like Ice
Those of us who have stood on the clear ice of a lake on a sunny day in January and looked down at the cracks, the frozen leaves, and the air bubbles know how beautiful it can be, even though we know that the cracks formed due to intense tensions, the leaves are dead, and the bubbles were trapped before they reached the atmosphere.
At every moment, we are free to look down into the ice of our past and see all the colours and shapes formed by everything that has ever happened on this planet during its four-and-a-half billion years of existence. At the present moment, we can see what stunning ice we stand on. Everything that exists today is the legacy of the past. Change one little thing in the past, and I wouldn’t exist.
Many of us spend time regretting things we did, feeling guilty about what we didn’t do, and blaming others for what happened. We dream of going back in time and making things right. We love movies about time travel, and we spend time pondering all our ‘what-ifs’. But the past is frozen. There is no going back. And therein lies the liberation.
The past is the stable foundation for this moment, and when I fully accept that, I can see the present and the future more clearly, with an open heart and mind. Can you?
Standing Firmly and Free
The frozen past of my personal life
The frozen past of our human history
The frozen past of planet Earth
I’m standing firmly on the stable iceberg
With my eyes and heart wide open
I see the beauty in all the cracks
Free to change my perspective
Free to understand the cracks and forgive
Our Future is as Unpredictable as the Movement of Water Vapour
If you have been lying on your back in the grass, looking up at the clouds, you have seen how they change forms and colours endlessly. Every moment, new shapes come into existence and disappear. A slight breeze, a human breath, or a butterfly flapping its wings creates swirls and shapes that weren’t there before. Every move affects the entire atmosphere and our future.
Chaos theory is a relatively new branch of science. It took off with the introduction of computers, when it became possible to perform thousands of iterations with slightly different starting values. These tiny changes were amplified over time, leading to significant and unpredictable outcomes. Small changes now, huge impact over time.
Water vapour is invisible and mobile; its molecules bounce around in all directions and move quickly. Their next moment cannot be predicted. Even the best scientists with the largest computers can’t calculate what is happening in a cloud. It’s chaotic and unpredictable, just like our future.
There are, of course, more stable forms. And the future builds on the past, but the further you go into the future, the more unpredictable it gets. And that is why I love to think about the future as water vapour. No one knows the future. Time is not a river, not a continuum of the past.
Evolution occurs at every moment, and new unpredicted emergent levels appear suddenly. Rocks didn’t predict life. Single-cell organisms didn’t foresee multicell life. Even the slightest puff of wind will change the form of the water vapour forever. What we do now has an impact for the next billion years.
Every thought, every particle, every movement affects its surroundings in ever-widening circles.
With my every breath, every move, every thought
I change the future of this planet forever
We Can Only Act in the Liquid Moment of Now
In the present now, when you read this, the water vapour of the future condenses and turns into the ice of the past. Now is the only time when anything has ever happened. It’s the only time we can act. It is in the brief liquid phase that all creation takes place. When possibilities manifest. The future turns into history. It is in the present and only in the present that I can blow on the water vapour and look at the solid ice.
We only ever live in the present now. Everything it holds is there because of the past. And it is the starting point for everything that will ever happen.
The Shortest Now – Holds Eternity
Many years ago, I had a strange experience during a Zen retreat. I focused on the present moment, and I made it shorter and shorter. Suddenly, the present Now opened up like a deep chasm into infinity. Time cracked open. All moments that have ever existed were one and present simultaneously. It lasted only for a moment or maybe for all time.
I cannot live my life in that form of time, but I can live with that experience as a beautiful crack in my present, past and future.
The shortest Now
splits time
The shortest Now
holds eternity
The Block Universe – Is it All Ice?
The Block Universe is a theory that might point to what I experienced on that retreat. It is supported by special relativity but challenged by quantum mechanics. According to this theory, our universe is a four-dimensional block containing everything and all of time. Past, present, and future are all equally real in this theory. Then there is the growing block theory that says that everything in the past and the present exists, but the future does not. So the block is growing with every moment. The problem with this model is that it’s hard to pinpoint the present moment in the block according to the theory of relativity. And if your brain is spinning right now, it’s because time is a spooky feature of our universe that even the most brilliant scientists struggle to understand and fit into their models.
The Timeless Now – The Unconditional Perspective
These fancy block models and my strange experience during the retreat are not the type of time we are dealing with as human beings living our lives on planet Earth inside the ice factory. However, there is another time dimension that we can benefit from in our daily lives: the timeless Now.
The timeless Now is a way of perceiving time that is intertwined with the unconditional perspective, and we will dive deeper into that in section D.
I Only Live Now
Only in the present now do I stand on the solid ice of the past.
Only in the present now do I blow on the water vapour of the future.
Only in the present now do I live.
We are always together in this liquid water phase.
Shaping our common future together, moment by moment.