definition. Hours can stand still even as the clock goes on ticking. Time can fly, like a hummingbird: an emerald and ruby jewel on whirring wings—a glimpse . . .
. . . and gone.
Flowing Time
We tend to view time, with all of its perceived beginnings and endings—its before’s and after’s—as progressing in a certain order and in a certain direction, all too often skipping right over now in favor of what was or what might be. We begin at a beginning and end at a conclusion. We make of time a river upon whose banks we sit and watch it flowing past:
Time irreversible.
In fact, before we ever thought of time in mathematical, astronomical, or even quantum mechanical terms we thought about it in agricultural ones. We paid particular attention to whatever river was nearby. For the Ancient Egyptians, life itself—both this side of death and after it—depended on the River Nile. The river was their calendar stretching over more than four thousand miles and marked three key seasons of life: flooding, growth, and harvest. Water and rivers flow throughout the Hebrew Bible, and at least one reference, the name of a Canaanite month, reveals further connection between flowing water and flowing time: Ethanim, the month of steady flowing, when only the most perennial streams still held water (1Kgs 8:2).
The first book of the Hebrew Bible tells of a primordial river that flowed out of Eden to the four corners of the earth (Gen 2). The New Testament concludes with a vision of another river, one that flows by the throne of God and by which Eden will be restored (Rev 22:1), a river that circles back to the original headwaters described in the Book of Genesis. The Ganges River is sacred to Hindus, the most auspicious place to perform one’s devotional meditation and bathing, not to mention the whispered offering of a sunset puja, or prayer. In fact, that religion has seven holy rivers and many others whose waters are significant. A dip in any one of those waters is thought to cleanse one of sin, an act that reverberates with the splash and dunk of Christian baptism, first performed also in a river, as we know from the story of John and Jesus on the shores of the Jordan in the desert country of Judea.
According to the revelation of the desert Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (peace be upon him), in the beginning was not light but water—the life-sustaining connection of a single atom of oxygen to two of hydrogen combined just so.
In fact, time is a river whose current is swift and flows in one direction only through all three Abrahamic faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Along its banks our salvation unfolds in an orderly progression—eschatologically—from the creation of the world to our fall and redemption; from judgment to last days to heavenly paradise. In other religions time, and therefore life—not to mention divine grace—isn’t quite as linear. Besides, no river’s course is perfectly straight. Just as our own stream of consciousness can take surprising twists and turns, any river always finds its way by whatever route necessary back to its source: the sea. Eventually, as Norman Maclean wrote in his short story, “all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”17
Buddhism and Hinduism, amongst other traditions, view time’s passing in more cyclical terms. Rivers flow out in every direction from the primal headwaters of the Navajo creation story. Taoism teaches to live in harmony with a concept of time that is more like a repeating rhythm than a river. If time is a river it is one that flows in more than one direction. Or at least, as James Joyce would have us believe in his cyclical and final masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake,18 one that has no “once upon a time” or “the end” but recirculates all along life’s . . .
. . . riverrun, an image rooted in the ancient philosophies of Heraclitus, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius who each noted in their own way that we cannot step twice into the same river. The thirteenth-century Buddhist poet/priest Chōmei echoed their insights in the opening line of his classic tale of impermanence: “the flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same.”19 When we come to the banks of any river we find ourselves at the very shores of space and time.
Try as we might we cannot dam time; neither the clock nor the calendar slows its flood. “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore / so do our minutes hasten to their end.”20 Nothing stands still. Modern physics reveals that the very building blocks of matter are not passive and inert, but constantly dancing with everything else in the universe. Every atom vibrates, pulses with energy, oscillates with the absorption and emission of existence itself. Everything is in the dynamic process of both being and becoming. Change is the eternal constant; life is liquid, riverine. Time can slow to a trickle—or overflow its banks and become a torrent. Regardless of the direction the river flows it branches into tributaries we call the past, the present, and the future—the rivulets Augustine called memory, attention, and expectation—what was, is, and will be.
The Romans saw the Milky Way—the great river of stars above our heads—as the luminous wake of a celestial ship. To the Māori of New Zealand it is a canoe crossing the sea. In Chinese astronomy, it is a celestial river; people of Eastern Asia believed it was the Silvery Stream of Heaven. The Aboriginal People of Australia see the band of stars as a river in the “skyworld,” and in Hindu myth it is Akasaganga, which means “the (Ganges) River of the Sky.”
Something in us has always understood the implications of the stars streaming by above our heads; the flickering, fleeting firelight of life’s timelessness.
In the beginning was flow, flux . . . change.
And ever since: nothing has been the same.
11. Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life, 130.
12. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, 52.
13. For Taoist, Hindu, and Gnostic references see, for example, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 51, 201–202; and Hooper, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu, 53, 55.
14. Griffith, Hymns of the Rig-Veda, II, 621–22.
15. In Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, 1.
16. Buber, I and Thou, 18.
17. Maclean, A River Runs Through It, 104.
18. In what is the beginning and end—and beginning again—of his literary classic: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun.” Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 628, 3.
19. Chōmei, Hōjōki, 19.
20. Shakespeare, “Sonnet 60.1–2” in The Complete Works, 1606.
The Time of Our Lives
We say the existence of eternity cannot be proven, that it makes no logical sense. But the same can be said of the measurement of something we’ve agreed to call, for lack of a better word, time. There was a time when we simply looked to the sky to guide us—when the planet
