Moments in Amber

Once, a long time ago, I saw a vision of myself.

I was nearing the end of my undergraduate degree. I left class and sat on a large stone block between the English building and the student union building. It was a central place in our campus, and I sat there just to watch people walk by. But as I sat there, rather than seeing other people, I began to see myself!

I saw myself from three years prior, walking from my freshman dorm to my freshman French class. The self that I saw in that moment existed on a day shortly after 9/11. She wore flared jeans (which were wet from the rain), a lavender tank top layered over a camisole, and a gray zip-up hoodie. She was worried, because there was an uncertain future on the horizon, for both herself and her country.

I saw myself passing with a camping backpack, preparing for a backpacking trip that would be miserable, but would end up adding shape and color to my life. (At the time, I never thought any of the skills I learned would apply to my "real" life, but decades later, I thought of these lessons as a friend and I survived out of our backpacks for weeks on the Camino de Santiago in Spain.)

Sitting on a stone and seeing my past self, I realized that my past self still existed. She was still there, walking across campus, having the same thoughts and feelings. I could not reach her, but I knew she existed, because I existed.

What I didn't realize at the time, was that not only did my past self still exist, she was still creating future me. The lesson that she was about to learn would be create a person that would agree to a backpacking trip through Spain, staying in sparse accommodations (because she knew she had already seen worse).

The past, present, and future, are all one, and all exist at the same time. (And if this is true--if all time exists simultaneously--then it is not an illusion that past me still exists. She does exist, right now, in this moment, just as I exist in this moment, and future me exists in this moment.)

Our lives are like insects trapped in amber, except we are beings trapped in time. What we experience as a lifetime is really a moment in simultaneous time. We are a single form, that exists yesterday, today, and tomorrow, because all those days are really one.

Each moment we have can only occur once. The universe leads up to it, and then recedes away. Each moment is a singular event, preserved in amber for all time. Its effects may be felt for generations, or never at all, but no matter what happens, we know that the moment itself existed.

And this understanding--that the past, present, and future all exist at once--assuages a lot of my fears about death. I will not disappear into nothingness forever, because past me still exists. Just as my deceased relatives, who I cannot see, still exist, and the moments I shared with them exist not just in my memory, but in space-time.

Yes, I will die. But I leave a life behind, trapped in time, like a fossil. There will always be evidence that I was here.