Time

Cézanne drew and painted Mont Sainte-Victoire over 80 times. Although from different perspectives, it was essentially just the mountain. This mountain has been there for a very long time; it exists in another time. A fruit fly lives for one day, then it's all over. We think in terms of generations when we expand our time horizon. A few hundred years seems like a lot to us. Our cultural history began 5,000 years ago. For a mountain, that's practically yesterday. What do we see when we observe the same object at different times of day, different seasons, in different moods, and from different perspectives? Ourselves? The perception of another? But never the mountain itself in its existence.

We know the moment, a life, an epoch; we reflect on paleontology, geological time, and cosmic times or chronons. How do we relate to this? How can our imagination reach these layers of time? Furthermore, why do we explore the past and imagine the future? The synthesis of my experienced past and my anticipated future shapes the now. It is only in this intertwining of time that we experience ourselves as individuals. However, if we focus on the moment – the pure now – and lose ourselves in meditation, we overcome our ego and are fully present.

It is this contemplative experience of time when we look at the stars, or listen to the waves or crickets, the experience that our consciousness is always part of time other than the now.