Imagining a “new” year begins today serves us well, even if it isn’t “real” in any absolute sense. To celebrate the beginning of a new year is one of those polite fictions we use to order our days and our deeds. “Happy New Year” refers to know absolute point in the endless tide of time, but it reassures us all to say it, and so we do. The beginning of a “new year” is, by strict logic, no more than a convenience, a convention, an arbitrary marker that, for time out of mind, has allowed human beings to carve the immensity of time into manage-ably sized pieces.
We need that, lest the overwhelming expanse of time, like an infinite wilderness, swallow us without a trace. The American west was like that once, unimaginably vast expanses of land stretching further than the eye could see in every direction. To make it manageable the powers-that -were devised a system of sections and quarter-sections, acres and homesteads, to make the near-infinite approachable, usable, attainable.
For all our vaunted longing for freedom, we long for limits as much or perhaps more. Infinite time and space makes us all anxious. We cannot take our bearings from immensity. so it came about that the ancients chose to parcel out time on the basis of the cycles of celestial orbits, creating years and months and weeks for our use. God has created the infinite out of God’s own immensity; it fell to humanity to create time.
To some extent the human mind can and does imagine near-infinite regression and progression in time and space. To the extent that we can apprehend an intimation of infinity, it paralyzes us. Instead we learned to organize the surrounding territories of existence into portions. Hours and days, miles and light-years all arise out of our desire–our need–to find a handle on the experiences we commonly refer to as “reality.” Another polite convention, perhaps, but indispensable to life together. I for one embrace it wholeheartedly, as a necessary fiction. With these colorful threads we may stitch together our time and space inways that allow us to establish the daily rituals by which we circumnavigate our own existence.
Some among us have divined that these threads may actually be constitutive of…well, everything. String theory, a developing branch of theoretical physics, postulates that subatomic particles are one-dimensional strings. All that we can know of our universe is woven of these one-dimensional strings. The theory combines quantum mechanics and general relativity into a quantum theory of gravity, the Philosopher’s Stone of theoretical physicists, that which could give us vantage point for surveying all that is, was, and will be. Since string theory is widely believed to provide a consistent theory of quantum gravity many hope that it correctly describes our universe, making it the “theory of everything” our best minds long to grasp.
Whether or not these “strings” thread together the whole of existence I do not know. What I am pretty sure about is that the threads of my life (and I guess yours too) are the things that give enough definition to my days that I can function. Breakfast time, bead time, business hours, all these threads hold together the moments and meanings of life so that we can not only grasp the world around us, but feel a sense of control too. Strands of deep aubergine dreams thread through the small hours of the morning. The merry spirit of an unexpected guest weaves a line of yellow at midday. The hem of our public lives we bind with threads of degree programs, tenure, seniority, retirement, in thousands of colors and weights.
The cut-offs are arbitrary. The lines, the strings the threads little more than mutually agreed upon conventions not too dissimilar from imaginative child’s play in which the playmates agree that one corner of the living room is the store, another the doctor’s office, and still another the school. So too with wishing you a Happy New Year. Today is as good a day as any other to stitch a line in time, a marker to help us find our bearings. From threads such as these we weave our lives, in patterns beautiful and terrible, but most often unremarkable. the wonder comes in that they are the moments and places that bind us together in a shared experience of time and space and place, the vessel in which we receive the gift of love, not as a thin one-dimensional string, but as the very ground of our being. A distinguished academic, in his last days in the existence we commonly call “ours,” whispered to his loved ones that the experience was one of being “suspended in grace…and dependent on love.” These are the real threads of our existence, holding together our days and our deeds, seamlessly linking heaven and earth, the here and the hereafter.
Threads. Strings in theory, time and space as real as we can know it. Sheer gift, all of it.
Filed under: The Station Platform
