Maria Oost 05-07-2023
A response to Sint Augustine - ‘’confessions’’
‘Time’ have you ever thought about it? I didn't consciously think about it before this semester of school, but a whole new world opened for me. I now did an investigation about time in nature and in the city. St. Augustine, born in the year 354 after Christ, is a well-known philosopher amongst other things. He asks himself and to God ‘’What is time?’’ in chapter 11 of his book ‘confessions’. He covers the subjects past, present and future. He points out how only the present exists, the past and future are only in our thoughts. The past doesn’t exist anymore, and future doesn’t exist Yet.
This resonates with mindfulness and my own believes. For me the present time is the most valuable because it’s where we are able to experience. I believe living in the ‘present’ makes you feel most alive and achieve long-term satisfaction. Just like they teach you in mindfulness lessons; Focus on the present moment. These thoughts don’t mean that I fully live in the present, the opposite seems to be true. I overthink the past and future many times. Something that can be developed by using consciousness and taking actions in behavior.
When you achieve to be in the present moment, there is no future or past, you live in eternity. I don’t believe ‘life’ has an end or beginning. Sure, the physical shape of ‘life’ comes and goes, grows and die’s. But ‘life’ itself, is an eternal energy in my believes. You see, with our human brain we can't understand the logic of existence being eternal. When there’s a painting in the woods, someone must have hung it there. But what if no one did? And it just has been there for eternity.
Further on in the text St. Augustine covers the subject of endurance, how we judge time to be long or short, for something to have happened a short or long time ago. How do you measure time when it’s a floating concept? There are a lot of possible answers to this question. I found the relativity theory of Einstein to be really interesting. The theory claims that you can only measure relativity of speed between 2 subjects.He uses light as an example. Light is the fastest moving ‘subject’ we know about. Little particles move so fast we can’t see them with our bare eyes, we only see the interaction with a surface. As human beings we move slower than the light particles. But if we would run in the direction the light particles are moving and we achieve to move at the same speed, we would be able to actually see the particles individually. (Mitch Waldorp, 2023). Or an explanation I like to think about; Imagine standing on a sidewalk and a car drove by with someone holding a piece of paper with a text on it. You aren’t able to read it, because the text moves to fast. Then imagine walking in the same direction as the car at the same speed. Now it becomes possible to read the text, because it seems like the text is standing still.
So when we talk about our experience of speed, we measure it from our perspective. I am moving at e certain speed and a subject outside of me can move slower, faster or equal to me.
For 2 weeks I’ve investigated the experience of time in nature and in the city. I did this by copying the movement and speed of a tree, with my body. The movement of my breathing I translated to the leaves moving in the wind. Experiencing the speed of movement of a tree is not appealing to the human body I can say. As you can see the movement of a tree growing is not visible in the present moment, but only visible when you re-visit the tree over a longer time span. It brought up a lot of frustration moving this relatively slow. It made me want to move fast and harsh in contrast to the slow organic movement. After trying and tying again with a lot of frustration and asking myself what there was to find in this experience, I found out something very interesting.
When you begin to understand that you shouldn’t experience the speed of the tree as a human being, but you should experience the speed of the surroundings as a tree, it becomes actually quite enjoyable. Because you move relatively slow to what you’re used to, you start to see how fast the surroundings move. You’ll start to perceive things you can’t perceive while moving as fast as an average human being. The things that move to slow to be perceived by human beings. I found my satisfaction in the ‘moving as a tree’.
When you begin to understand that you shouldn’t experience the speed of the tree as a human being, but you should experience the speed of the surroundings as a tree, it becomes actually quite enjoyable. Because you move relatively slow to what you’re used to, you start to see how fast the surroundings move. You’ll start to perceive things you can’t perceive while moving as fast as an average human being. The things that move to slow to be perceived by human beings. I found my satisfaction in the ‘moving as a tree’.
Where would you put yourself on the scale of speed between moving slow as a tree till moving as fast in high stress for your life being at risk?
The faster you move, the more your surroundings start moving, and the more you’ll notice the ‘smaller/slower’ movements. The slower you move, the less your surroundings are moving, the easier your able to look in detail at the fast-moving elements.
Sources;
- Saint Augustine, 397-398 AD, ‘confessions’, p. 267-292.
- Mitch Waldorp, 7 Maart 2023, ‘De relativiteits theorie van Einstein; wat houd die eigenlijk in?’, National geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.nl/wetenschap/2017/05/einsteins-relativiteitstheorie-in-vier-eenvoudige-stappen