'Presence' in a Block Universe
An alternative view of what it means to ~ be in ~ a given moment.
I drove around my hometown on Thanksgiving night.
I drove down one of my older brother’s past paper routes, a wobbly loop of streets which included the house that gave out full-sized candy bars on Halloween.
I drove past the house of my childhood friend whose father worked for Snapple when the company first became what we know it to be today, a man who would sneak home samples of new flavors for his daughter and her buddies to enjoy. I can still recall trying my first-ever peach Snapple, harmless contraband drunk down gratefully on their front lawn during golden hour, grass digging into our thighs as we plopped down next to our recently ridden bikes.
I drove past the house of the older kid whose head I split open one shrieking, hot summer day, because I — for some reason — thought it would be a good idea to turn a Slip ‘n’ Slide into a two-way street. He needed numerous stitches; I didn’t even get a bump, but I was so upset by the commotion, the hospital plans, the fault being my own that I wet my bathing suit while sobbing in our backyard all the same.
I drove past the house of the first boy I ever had a crush on, and wondered who he grew up to be. I wondered about the others who had also held my passionate, fleeting affections in past years. (I resisted the urge to search them out on social media later.)
I drove past my elementary school, and thought about how one of my earliest teachers had recently passed away. A kindly woman who first got me curious about the world of words with a school-year-long exercise that involved the class constructing a “vo-caterpillar” around the classroom, piece by piece - each student contributing one new word a day to its wrapping, bulbous body. I still recall adding one of my own — “conscientious” — to its considerable length. The word itself, its definition, and its proper use in a sentence, all written on a red circle of construction paper that was added to the being’s impossible abdomen.
As I drove, I thought about how that word has stayed with me in the years that have passed by since, a guiding principle that still informs my work, my loving, my living to this day. I thought about how words became one of my creative mediums of choice, and about how I refuse to limit my vocabulary around my 7-year-old (despite the looks I sometimes get), because I want him to similarly grow to appreciate the variety of words he has to play with. I thought about what else has stayed with me — those memories that flooded my mind as I carefully wove through that quiet town… the beautiful best friend I was driving to meet with, and our thick web of inside jokes and decades of ridiculous ups and downs… the family also waiting back at my childhood home, both blood and found. How that home is still my home, in its way. How lucky I am to have that, and how I hope to offer that same net to my child, no matter his age.
I thought about all else that had come and either stayed or gone since, as I drove to meet that patient life-long friend — my husband on the couch with my mother and father back at that home, where they’d just hosted a whopping 16 of us for the big meal, my friend and I soon to rejoin them; my son playing board games with my brother’s children, and the children of a different life-long friend, all of their bellies filled with pie they enjoyed after a frigid, giggle-filled hour playing soccer on our old high school’s football field. About changes I’d made in the past year that have me feeling like a particularly strong version of myself, in a more reflective portion of my side trip. And about my son some more, with whom I regularly enjoy twin sugar-free Snapples, marveling together at the facts they added to their bottle caps somewhere along the way. His favorite flavor is peach.
I thought, too, about things that lie ahead. Assorted 16-measure clumps of music I needed to review ahead of several upcoming concerts; about various forms of cancer (despite not wanting to consider them at all), noxious and dwelling and eating within the bodies of souls I love and have loved for as long as I can remember, and the questions those destructive, microscopic cells have created for all of us; about impending emergency surgeries; about blueberry pie recipes; about making it back in time after one of my many upcoming rehearsals to see if I can catch my son scoring another goal in soccer practice; about changes I still wanted, and needed, to make in my own life.
And, I felt — I felt nostalgia, and familiar, basically-ever-present anxiety… and the satisfying way my mother’s bejeweled steering-wheel cover dug into my palms, and the slight ache in my ass, muscles still sore from an hours-long group hike enjoyed the day prior… and the happiness that can only come from days packed with sweet activity and people, and warmth at the idea of so many I love overtaking my ever-generous parents’ living room… generations and memories and hopes and fears all gathered together under an impossible number of lamps, and the glow of their massive television which underscored the whole sweet din with holiday music. (Thanksgiving dinner had been consumed, so Christmas music was now allowed, we’d reasoned.)
I am forever feeling this much, truth be told. Somewhere, an Instagram influencer fluent in therapy-speak would be appalled by what surely seems like a flooded, meandering mind utterly devoid of discipline. I’m failing to be “in the moment,” they’d admonish me. Failing to appreciate the here and now. But I’d counter (in this fully imagined conversation) by introducing the concept of a “block universe” to the conversation — a philosophy of time which argues that past, and present, and future all exist together in a sort of cube, rather than as non-intersecting points along a boundless continuum.
(And then, admittedly, I’d falter to explain this theory any further, because the math and the “-isms” involved in a more profound, thorough defining of it are beyond me.)
But my bigger point, I’d argue, is that to forcibly separate ourselves, mentally and emotionally, from the beautiful, terrifying, overwhelming context provided by what has been and what may yet come, and how those things shape where we’re currently “at,” and who we are, moment to moment — would be the real sin.
That our joy and our burden is to hold the lot of it, as much as we’re able to do so. That living and loving this life, and honoring existence — being *in it* as they would say — means digging into the complex work of living and loving it in its multi-dimensional entirety.
Just as we’re called to love one another — highs and lows, and peach Snapples and MRIs, and raucous rounds of Telestrations and formative crushes and word caterpillars, and inside jokes and disagreements, and private tears and group laughs, and sweet shoulder kisses and frustrated sighs that we choose to ignore…
And warts and joy and terror and all.