To Believe in Time, or Not to Believe in Time

"I confess, I do not believe in time". -- Vladimir Nabokov

I am beginning to believe that Nabokov was right when he confessed that he does not believe in time. Even though I feel it passing, like some kind of constant breeze, I still have trouble relating it to myself. I am still a mind that feels ageless in some ways. Almost trapped I would say. So as my physical being moves through time and space, my mind and my spirit seem not to be moving in step.
And that is where belief resides…inside oneself.

But all around me I am faced with the consequences of the passage of time. I am faced with the changing seasons, with the loss of hair, children becoming adults and these markers go on and on and on. It is such a bewildering world and everything, and I do mean everything , seem to be measured with a yardstick of time. Some physicists even look to time as some sort of matter. Solid. Something with measurable mass.

A butterfly is the result of a egg being laid and then hatching after a certain passage of time followed by its emergence as a caterpillar. But wait, the caterpillar then spends some “time” chomping its way through its preferred foliage until it turns into a pupae. Again, after a passage of time, that pupate will emerge as the butterfly we see flickering across the back yard or attempting to cross the road only to end up imbedded in a passing car’s radiator. End of time for the butterfly? Perhaps.

Perhaps not. What part of time really stopped for the butterfly? What part of time stopped for the person behind the automobiles steering wheel?

Maybe we spend too much time trying to gauge the movement of time. It is if you look at it with some open-minded perspective, a solid entity. It is glacial in a sense. The actual passage is slow but the speed is measured by those outside it. A fruit fly is but a brief parallel along the path being carved by time. A butterfly, a bit longer. A dog or a Man, longer. A jellyfish, longer yet.

For me, my calendar is starting to become my enemy. It throws those dates with those things written to do and stands there with so much power. It is like a bully standing over me but in this case I seem to be bullying myself.

So you can maybe see why I wishfully am starting to be a disbeliever in time. To believe is to enslave. I wish to be free of time so I can live.