Time flows like a river. But not toward the future. It moves FROM the future TO the present, and then the past. So, I’m gonna share the next misconception, about time, that I mentioned in a previous post.
Yeah, time flows like a river. But not toward the future:
Time’s arrow is almost universally described as pointing from the past to the future such that the current of time flows forward. Of course this is a metaphor, yet this widespread impression is unintentionally exactly wrong. The truth is the reverse.
For to whatever extent way we may speak of time flowing, then to that extent time flows from the future into the past. The current of time brings the future into the present and the present into the past.
Using the metaphor of a river, while docks and anchors resist the flow, other things readily float along with the current. Regarding time, what is it that resists its flow, and what rides in its current? Dates, for example, ride the current of time keeping pace perfectly with its flow. Tomorrow’s date, yielding no resistance, suspended perfectly in time, readily moves with the current and will eventually arrive, not at a point further into the future. But, being carried by time, will eventually arrive at the present, and then recede into the past.
Even entire books written on the topic, like Coveney and Highfield’s atheistic Arrow of Time inaccurately speak of “time’s forward movement.”
Incorrectly men assume that the current of time sweeps us from birth to death.
That would be moving us toward the future.
But more accurately, the current of time eventually sweeps our entire earthly lives into the past. Time does not carry our birth forward into the future, nor (as it might if time flowed forward) does it forever postpone our physical death nudging it later and later. Rather, “I” am like a floating buoy anchored to the river bed bobbing and resisting the flow of time.
Contrariwise, the “events” that I experience are not similarly anchored and so being vulnerable to the flow of time, as sediment suspended in a river current, they are whisked into the past. So things can resist the flow of time, so to speak, but events cannot.
And like events, pointers, or markers to moments in time, flow perfectly with the current of time. Thus at the time of this writing, the “date” of January 1, 2020 is floating toward the present, caught up as it is perfectly in the current of time, and will eventually reach the present, and then, as age piles on top of age, greatly recede, with the flow of time carrying it forever further and further into the distant past.
I think that sums up the flow of time very nicely. And it all reminds me of a song I wrote called I Can Do.
Here’s a verse from that song:
Outside the lines the grass is greener.
But that will not change my demeanor.
Because my life runs like a river.
I’ll take what all my days deliver.
And eventually it’ll deliver me into Heaven.
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