The Nature of Time

The nature of time has changed and I blame it all on the internet. Once upon a time, time used to only move forward. What happened in the past stayed in the past. But now, because of the Internet, events, objects, people, memories, all that happened in the past and once belonged only in the past have now re-emerged and are becoming part of the present. Time is no longer linear, going in just one direction and I don’t know how I feel about that.

The first phase in my life was spent in Jersey City and I lived there till I was 4. Except for images in a few black and white photos, I remember almost nothing of the place. After Jersey City, my parents moved me to the wilds of north Jersey, a place called Budd Lake. There was a real lake in Budd Lake and it had the dubious distinction of being New Jersey’s largest natural lake. I spent 1st to 8th grades at Budd Lake School in Budd Lake. To this day, when I look at a picture of my eighth grade class, I can still recall the names of almost everyone in that picture. My high school years were spent at West Morris Regional High School. (Through the help of the Internet, I’ve now found out that its now called West Morris Central and is no longer regional.) But in my timeline, in my past reality, it will always be West Morris Regional. It was a big school combining kids from 5 different school districts. As I entered High School, I took with me some friends from grade school and made some new ones.

These first 3 parts of my past were like books. Jersey City was like a children’s book, pictures without words. Only a few black and white photos left to show me my life there. The start of grade school was like the beginning of a whole new book, with chapters. With High School being the sequel to the grade school years. In the high school sequel, some of the characters stayed the same but new ones were added with new adventures. I can’t say I much liked those books. They had their ups and downs, sometimes sad, sometimes happy. I looked forward to the high school sequel. But halfway through it, it became one of those books that because you are not really involved in it, you read it as fast as you can because you just want to get to the end. I couldn’t wait to get to the end. And start a new book and the new book was going to be New York City.

When I was 18 I went to art school, Pratt Institute. I left New Jersey to go live in New York City without any regrets. I couldn’t wait to leave. I put it in my past. I turned my back on the years in NJ, and except for the fact that my parents still lived there I never looked back. Time marched on and that part of my life was over. The last New Jersey book had been closed. I packed them away. I opened the high school book once in 1979 to go to a 10th reunion but immediately packed it away again. While I still remember some of the stories, I never opened those books again. They belonged to the past. The Pratt Institute Art School book, the fourth book, was the best of all of them.

You probably think I’ve wondered off track now. I started by talking about time and instead I’ve been taking about books. But it’s all related really. It’s now been 40 years since I closed and packed away those books. The people in them were part of my distant past. None of those people have reappeared in any other book since then. Those people would have stayed there, part of my past, memories only, forever young. And then the Internet got invented! In a non-internet reality I probably would never have met them again. OK, perhaps in a train station or airport somewhere you might bump into someone from 40 years ago and actually recognize each other and as ships passing in the night say, “hi, how’s it been” and then continue on, letting them sink back into the past. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

My timeline has gone on, forward to the future, with all kinds of wiggles on the way. Living in Stockholm being a rather big wiggle. Each of those former classmates has followed their own timeline, their own reality, an alternate reality from mine. Some of them have shared timelines with each other. Since 1979, my timeline has been totally separate from any of theirs. But now the internet has pinched our timelines back together.

The pinching first started, when some former classmates from Budd Lake School found me via an internet site called Classmates.com. They made a site built just for our class from BLS. That was fun, exciting even, with exchanges of memories – a sort of confirmation that my past had really happened. Those dusty, closed books were opened again and re-examined. Nostalgia and the passing of years made those books look not so bad after all.

Then Facebook happened. And people from my Pratt Art School years came back from the past. Those College books have never totally been packed away. I often go back and reexamine those times and memories with great fondness. Some of those friends have followed my timeline ever since we first met and are still part of my life. But there were many others who didn’t and now they are back too. Their alternate realities have become part of my reality now in a very virtual way. The past has come back. The books are out of the packing boxes and back on the shelf and even sitting open on the coffee table and the question is “Do I want to reopen them and how much?” Do I want my past to become part of my present?