There are many mysteries of how we live our lives. Of what medium we swim in. Time and choice are tangled together. What I do here and now affects where it is I go and what I find. One choice will lead me one way, but surely some other choice would bring a different result. What is the nature of it all? Do all these strings of choice exist at once and always? If time exists as a string of multiple realities where each and every choice is made and has its own reality and ever exists, think of how it is. A tangled web of continuous branches crossing and re-crossing perhaps, certainly a complex thing that would boggle our minds, for every moment is a choice and a new path to endless other paths, ever divergent from itself, ever confused, ever existing, ever new, ever lost from true purpose.
But if time and choice are made as a linear thing, where choices are yet made endlessly and at every moment but only one line of choice exists (the one made) then it is a simple thing, a dynamic thing, leading to a true result even if that result simply be the path made. Then time is single dimensional and of a single reality.
Yet the question remains, does the past exist? The place where you and others have traveled? Or has it vanished like mists as if it never existed at all? A false memory? And only the 'now' exists, and only the 'now' ever has? Then time is a solid thing. Unchanging, unchanged. It is not at all dynamic. There are no choices. There is no future.
I think time is linear, a single dynamic reality of endless choices made and followed to where it leads. Where we pointed it. I think the past exists like a residue, an ingredient that flavors the present, and affects where we take the future. I think it is a dynamic world and there are lessons to be learned. It teaches us where to step. Which may be the better chosen path.
The residue of heros and fathers, mothers and sons. Builders and writers, philosophers and teachers. Past loves. All are contributions to the ingredients that make us what we are, and where we are bound. If we forget the ingredients of our lives and our world, the flavor will be lost. Our paths will become tangled and confused.
Life springs from the debris of the fall. Leaves upon the ground. New paths diverge from, but are built upon, the old. My child will make her own choices, but "is" because of other choices made. We are time travellers all. In part responsible for the future, in part a product of the past. There are paths to take and choices to be made. Make them with compassion and understanding, but make them with the hopeful optimism of a child.
I love where you went with this...it's often the focus of my philosophical world. I'd like to suggest that, on top of all this, the concept/view of time varies greatly between that of someone whose ego rules after judging the reality of its experience versus what the true self sees, sans the ego's rose-colored glasses. I flip-flop between the two planes, though I strive to stay on the latter. It is there where I see more clearly the choices available to me in the moment.
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