It occurs to me that naming a blog post “On Time” (re: philosophy) could just as easily be misinterpreted as “on time” (i.e. punctuality). For all of the great depth of Western, Eastern and Islamic thought on the matter, I think David Bowie captured the Zen simplicity in his song Changes: “Time may change me, but I can’t change time.”

Being that I am hardly “on time” as my computer is recovering from a small episode of graphics-card death and I have been unable to blog my self and the cornucopia of my day-to-day revelations and frustrations to the world, I would have to be bound by the philosophy of time and temporality more than conforming to notions of any time-specific boundaries of punctuality - I am bound by time, but not in time.

One of the interpretations of Zen (and it is apparent across the spectrum of faiths in various places) speaks of the “Eternal Now”. From memory (i.e. I can’t remember which part of the text this appears in) Marcus Aurelius speaks of this concept in his “Meditations“. In the context he is looking at it from, it is a matter that as a life is really only what is lived now at this very moment, this is all that we stand to lose when we die. This very moment, the living instant and existential moment of life, this is all that we possess and all that which is taken from us in death amounts to this singular moving temporal frame of experience.

I think that I do not move through time. Time moves through me.