Ready? …. …. …. … … … .. .. . . . . . NOW. Phew. That was now. How was it? It’s no longer now, so reflect on what it was. If it’s no longer now, how do we define now as now? To reflect we must move past it…our memories will color and change it. The now you knew and the now that was are never the same… just ask two different observers of the same moment. Jesse Bates in North Dakota, Laasya Chandaar in Dehli and Matsuhiro Nakamatsu in Fukuoka did not observe the same now… not at all. Thus we no longer have the object of our observation… like a silvery fish in the rushing river, it’s gone before we can identify it. It is not just time that eludes and moves: Each experience of now is in fact the experience of the universe expanding. Each moment unto us is born of distant galaxies getting ever more distant. The moment you just failed to properly observe has taken us both farther from everything else in the universe, and farther from every other moment that came before it.

Considering Space-Time is my favorite type of brain yoga. Twist your neurons into a few knots with me. Space and time are not just linked, they are entwined. Time moves quicker on the ground floor than it does at the 24th. Relativity might just be the secret to immortality. All you have to do is go as far away from everything you know, as fast as you possibly can. The edges of the universe are forever young… burning white hot, and moving implacably outwards towards… what?

Since the bang, there has been nothing but growing… nothing but more… and more… and more. Expansion, diffusion, largess, increase. Until what? Until when/where? In just the time it took for you to read this paragraph, thousands of new moments (and thereby millions of new miles of space-time) have been created. Such largeness is hard to adequately appreciate… infinitude is perhaps the only thing more difficult for a human brain to imagine, so let’s not.

Have you heard of antimatter? Richard Feynman, the quantum physicist, famously asserted that antimatter is just matter traveling backwards through time. Let us imagine a surfeit, a limit to the universe. Thereby follows contraction, ever-reducing, less-ness… a lessening of all things. Lets also accept that for each moment, there is an anti-moment. Anti-Time, as it moves backwards, gets smaller and smaller…lesser and lesser by the moment, like water emptying from a bowl. Is the water pouring out of this bowl in turn filling our ever-growing reservoir of time, second by second?

Perhaps even as you live your life, you are somehow ‘unliving it’ at the exact same time. For each electron a positron, for each proton an anti-proton… each moment of your life carries an equivalent ‘anti-moment’ wherein you incrementally cease to exist….not die, lets be clear, but cease to be or have been entirely. Perhaps the universe has already reached its outer borders… perhaps the white hot fringes of reality have finally cooled, somewhere out there, and are already running backwards alongside the expanding world we know and love. If it’s possible to stay the same age ‘forever’ if you travel fast enough, isn’t it also plausible that the end of all things is drawing nearer at the same time all things are expanding gloriously, reaching outwards and onward with each new moment?

So… are you both the you and the anti-you, simultaneously? Definitely not. I mean, in a sense yes… but also no. Right? To be something is to be somehow aware that you are something, yes? Your life goes moment to moment, forward, outward… your history, expanding, growing. You cannot also be contracting, shrinking, living backwards. There must be an anti-you… somewhere parallel but invisible to you, living your anti-life in reverse…but what if you met the anti-you? Would you recognize yourself in inverse? Would it be like looking in a mirror?  Would it be like looking at any other stranger on the street? “Opposites attract,” goes the saying, like poles of a magnet. Is that what we’re searching for in love? Is your husband, wife or lover your anti-self? Are you most in love with the person who is everything you are not? Is it not the goal of love to find your ‘other half’ and thereby become complete?

Love is perhaps the greatest of all quantum field experiments, endlessly blooming in the light of now.