109. Time Is Nothing

To see that time is nothing is both our fear and our glory.

It is our fear because we know that our own subjective existence is confined to a limited period of time. Once that period has come to an end, our individual experience will cease to exist. The limit of death is inescapable simply because we cannot live without our bodies that exist in time. If time is nothing then it would seem we are also nothing. Regardless of the length of our lives or the duration of our impact, we would be reduced to nothing relative to the endless universe. Our actions, our feelings, and our very existence itself would seem to have no meaning in a world so incredibly vast.

But if we truly see that time is nothing, then we also understand that the meaning of our lives cannot possibly be reduced in this way. For the beauty and truth we have experienced was never limited to time in the first place. Such things transcend anything that time can change, as they are not temporal but eternal. The joy we create in each instant cannot be lost to time, for it is a permanent part of existence forever contained in that instant. The present, then, is also much more than it seems. It is not merely a nothing quickly lost to history but an everlasting now, a now so wide and so infinite that it easily swallows the entire past and the entire future.

In seeing this, we also realize our lives can never be devoid of value. On the contrary, they are overflowing with it. There is almost too much value, certainly more than we could ever possess and even more than we could hope to see. To grasp that time is nothing is to bask in the glory of eternity, the infinite beauty that is existence itself.