Reflections on Time, a Life of Meaning, and Learning

Now more than ever, I’m feeling the enormous press of time, which marches in a singular direction. At odd moments, when we are restless or bored or waiting, we become aware of the invisible metronome that ticks away the beats of our unknown minutes, hours, days, years. I have been listening to it more than I think I ought to.

I think of our life similar to that of the experience of looking through one of those tourist binoculars you have to put a quarter into to view the sights around you (as seen on the cover of Bill Bryson’s book, I’m A Stranger Here Myself).

Binoculars used by tourists (minus the stars and smiley face) as seen on the cover of Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself. A book I recommend for its levity as much as its insightfulness.

We are likely on top of a tower or mountain, or at the edge of a pier—but always on the edge of something—and we place our quarter into the slot. We enjoy the sights and look around, getting our fill of some mundane details writ large, but hopefully a long view of the best of what’s around. And then, unexpectedly, suddenly, the shutter falls, and everything goes black. You know it’s coming but it always comes as a surprise, simply because no one is counting the time when they are looking at something amazing, and most people if not all haven’t a clue what the timer is set to. In a world of infinite quarters, this might not be a big deal, but in an existence where there is only one quarter, one life to spend as best as one can, it makes all the difference. A careful observer might witness the tourist ahead of him jerk his head back in surprise as the shudder falls, and hear him mutter, “Well, I guess that was it…” So the second person in line holds his quarter and steps up to the bifocal lens, determined to make the most of his time by immediately focusing on that which he is most eager to see, so that when his time is almost up he is satisfied that it was meaningful.

Even for those that believe there is “life after life,” nearly everyone agrees that this is very likely to be the only life we get here as “us,” as we currently are. Many still make the same assumption that Descartes made hundreds of years ago, that there is “mind” and there is “body,” and that the two are fundamentally separate from each other. This naturally leads to the assumption that the “mind” can exist apart from the brain or the body.  Perhaps you believe we come back as a flower (a mindful one?), or a duck, or a harp player in the cosmos somewhere. I don’t think there is sufficient reason to believe that any of that is true, and even if it was, our “quarter,” our live, is a specific kind of currency that can only be spent once while we are here. We may shudder at the thought but the shutter closes upon us all, and that is that.

So, this again brings us back to a question of how to get the most meaning out of how we spend what we have. I brought up the mind and the brain just now because I believe it gets to the core of this question. We used to measure death by when the heart stops beating, and in many cases we still use this indicator, but some people are on life support after their heart dies and are therefore not dead. Perhaps a better indicator is when we are completely brain dead, but there are cases when people are “brain dead” but still alive, and even show some brain activity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEuh6tDidUw). However, are either of these stays what we think of when we think of “living”? Most people would make a distinction between “existing” or even “conscious” and “living” in the full sense of the word. I’ll get right to what I think makes the difference: We measure the quality of our lives, in a large part, by what we see, experience, and learn. Unless we are physically blind, 80% of what we learn is through what we see, hence the binocular metaphor for life. Our experiences help us learn and see things differently, and this learning in turn adds greater depth to our future experiences. It is a continual cycle. What we learn, and what we experience is what generates meaning in our lives, and that meaning is made greater by the people that we share it with. I believe this is why I ultimately want to be and continue to become an instructional designer. Because learning and teaching to others through great experiences is the most direct path we have to a meaningful life, and it is a kind of work that can outlast us.

And by this, we come to the only life I believe we will have after our life is done—we live on in the memories, learning, and experiences of others. What we do and what we see and what knowledge we acquire have the ability to outlast us¹ (see footnote). So much human activity, specifically in the information and Internet age, is dedicated to maintaining this store of experiences and information, and rightly so, as our progress of any kind is contingent upon it.

I began by talking about my hyperawareness of time as of late, and how that’s made me think of how best I wish to use it. Socrates said that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Perhaps it is also true that a life examined and scrutinized too closely is not worth living either, being too tedious and even painful. To an extent, in order to function in life we have to take some things for granted to an extent, such as our time. Perhaps there is a happy medium, where we are aware of our limited time enough so as to make the most of it, but not so hyperaware as to be paralyzed by the fear of having wasted it. I think that’s an idea that Socrates and Aristotle would embrace, for what it’s worth. While I’m here, and while I have my quarter in the slot, my aim is to focus on living a life of learning and passing that on to others, as best I can. To me, this is the life I see that matters.

 

1.      Footnote: Our learning and information can survive individual humans, but it will not survive humanity, so this is not a play at “immortality” by any stretch of the imagination, especially when you consider information’s “half-life,” and that most information in our own lifetimes will become lost or irrelevant. If humans were to die off, our book paper would last hundreds of years, but the words printed on it would be washed away or made illegible as the pages turn to carbon. Our batteries will corrode, the hard drives and routers would fail, and there would be no electricity to run it all anyway. Even if beings rivaling or surpassing our intelligence from far away discovered what was left behind, very little of our “living” as we know it would be recoverable, save a few buildings, empty shells of our former existence...