How Long Is the Present?

A visit with a childhood friend made me realize I’ve reached the age of reflection

Charlie, one of my dearest classmates from high school, wrote to tell me he had stage three cancer. I don’t know what that means. I don’t want to know. Fortunately, he didn’t tell me until he was already on the mend.

“Don’t worry, I’m better now, I’m even running again.”

That was a kindness. He provided me with the sense of urgency that makes you stop putting off plans, but spared me the anguish of what he’d been through.

I’m young enough that this is the first message I’ve received like that, but old enough to know that this is only the beginning.

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Yesterday, I sat down with Charlie’s family to eat dinner. We happened to be in town, and I said, “Let’s meet at the Mall of America.” He showed up with his wife and his two kids and we went to a place called the Rain Forest Cafe. It was like a restaurant from Disney World. It had animatronic animals.

I had a big smile on my face the whole time we were together. It was like a free vacation. We just waved our wands and made it happen. There was no planning other than the need to get together, and it all worked out perfectly.

It made me stop and wonder why it’s so infrequent that we find the time to stop and savor a moment.

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I’m at the age where everything is a rush. I spend my weekdays driving my kids to school, working, and then shuttling them off to some kind of practice. I spend my weekends driving to soccer tournaments and piano recitals. I’m not complaining. These days are glorious but it’s always in motion. We don’t stop much.

My daughters are not quite teens. What a fun age. They’ve become tall and powerful. They understand things without being told. We do family games like ultimate frisbee, soccer, and pickleball. I’m writing this from South America. It’s our annual family trip.

We didn’t go on trips during the pandemic.

The pandemic changed how we interact, but in some ways it became better. We’re more united. We learned that if you’re stuck in the house together, you have to fill your shared space with as much kindness as possible.

My girls, in particular, really bonded. That bond has not eroded.

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My girls are at the age I was when I bonded with Charlie. I was reminded of that fact at the restaurant. Our bond wasn’t one singular instant, it was a shared experience. Charlie was one of the kind kids when I was most vulnerable and needed allies. He’s been in my memories for virtually all my life.

Charlie has a kind and loving family. In high school, we had three boys named Charlie in my small class of 106. Our 30 year reunion is coming up, I wasn’t planning on going. But maybe…

Charlie earned his PhD in Chemistry. He’s one of the few success stories from our class. I have another friend, Grady, who is a Lieutenant Colonel in the military. He’ll be a Colonel someday. To me, getting a PhD and becoming a Lieutenant Colonel is pretty big news. Charlie was second in our graduating class. Grady was fourth. I was sixth.

I guess we’re the even numbers.

My wife once asked me, “Why weren’t you valedictorian?”

I said, “I have too smart of a mouth.”

But that’s an unfair thing to say. The students who beat me beat me fairly. I had a lot of things to work through back then. Actually, I feel fortunate that I made it through at all.

My daughter overheard this conversation and asked, “Can I be valedictorian?”

Wouldn’t that be something? But her class is bigger than mine, so I said, “That’s a worthy goal to work towards, but whether you make it or not it won’t change how proud I am of you.”

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I’m always humbled when I’m in the presence of Grady or Charlie. From my perspective, they have both achieved so much more than I have. I’m at the age of reflection, I often find myself wondering if I could have made better use of my time.

Charlie is one of the kindest men you’ll ever meet. He speaks in a soft voice and always, always appears humble and grateful for his life.

He also practices ultimate fighting. I can’t quite make those two parts of his personality fit together in my mind.

In high school I remember him being driven. He put himself under so much stress that he couldn’t sit still. He vibrated with tension. However, I could always coax a laugh out of him.

Anyone could tell he needed it.

That was my currency in high school. On most days, my objective, whenever I crossed paths with my friends, was to get a laugh out of them. They got used to it. I could see their expressions brighten when they saw me in the hallway. Most of the time I had something clever to say. It got so that even when whatever I said wasn’t so clever, they used to give me a laugh anyway. It was sort of an “Attaboy Walter, I know you’ll do better next time.”

But every now and then I hit them with a really good gut-buster. Every now and then I hooked a giant laugh and pulled it into the boat. It was the kind of laugh you take a picture with. Now, thirty years later, when I see them they pull out those pictures from their wallets and we laugh again.

These are the kind of things you should put out into the universe. They come back around.

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When I saw Charlie before dinner I trotted over and embraced him in a long hug. I felt compelled to hug him. It was a post cancer hug. Those are good hugs. You remember those hugs.

Just seeing him brought up a whirlwind of memories. Back in 1983, when ‘Return of the Jedi’ was first released, there was this Han Solo toy where the character was encased in carbonite. It was an action figure that fit into a transparent plastic shield that replicated the scene from the movie.

You could get this toy to recreate the moment when Han Solo was freed. That movie came out 40 years ago.

Seeing Charlie brought up that memory like a leaf on the wind. I hadn’t thought about that toy for decades. When you see childhood friends you’re caught up in a whirlwind of such memories. They flutter all about you, and you have only to reach out and pluck them from the air to fall into a moment of pleasant nostalgia.

You drift off into your thoughts, and your kids look at you and wonder what you’re smiling about.

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This whole cancer thing reminded me to appreciate Charlie. I’m lucky, he’s still here. We hadn’t seen each other in maybe six years. That’s the way time goes these days. It disappears in large chunks. Your children sprout and move out. Life goes on.

I’ll remember that hug from seeing him again. I hugged him when we said goodbye too.

I wanted to get into his memories a little more. Here we are in our late middle age creeping toward old age. A lot of the questions we’ve had all our lives have answers now. We might not like the answers, but we might as well sit and compare them. I want to know what motivated him. Why does he need to do the ultimate fighting?

You always kind of wonder what happened to people you met in your life, particularly your classmates from school. Every day in class, I saw the way they made choices. How did their way of making choices work out over the course of a life?

Charlie was always driven.

Grady was defiant.

I’m more of a rise to the occasion type of guy. I didn’t have to fight like Grady. I don’t prepare like Charlie. Instead, I look for updrafts and spread my wings.

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Charlie and I did a ski race together a few years ago and Charlie was awesome. He was as thin and as twitchy as a bow. I carry too much weight and only make it to the finish line because I’m too stubborn to quit.

Maybe it could be said that Charlie seeks to control things more than I do, and I’m content to wait for something funny to happen. That’s not quite it, but it’s part of it.

I think maybe the difference between us is that he has an objective and I know the thing I want to achieve hasn’t been discovered yet.

Charlie could focus and get a PhD and have a wonderful life. As for me, I’m mistrustful of any institution. I like to look for the flaws in commonly accepted ideas and then try out the alternate timeline. You can’t plan for the kind of experiences I most enjoy, you just have to wait for them to happen.

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One of the things I learned when I was studying Physics is that there are a lot of approaches to solving a problem. Sometimes two people go in opposite directions only to meet at the solution.

It’s always a delight to have a conversation with a nimble mind. Charlie’s the same as Grady, they try things out on me. I can’t quite keep up with the math, but there’s a surprising amount of philosophy in science.

At dinner, Charlie began talking about time.

“If time is infinite, and the universe expands and contracts and is reborn, and this constant contraction, destruction, and rebirth goes on again and again, that means our whole lives will reemerge in the void.”

It’s the infinite number of monkeys banging on keyboards and writing ‘Hamlet’ scenario.

The problem with infinity is that there’s too much of it. Infinity is eternity. The universe is infinite and it expands. But what is it expanding into?

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Charlie began to talk about our perception of time. Is time a construct because we simply can’t comprehend the reality of our existence? How does the passage of time even work? Is there a time particle? That sounds ridiculous but maybe that’s just because our model for comprehending reality is flawed. What’s the mechanism by which time functions? Can we make it slow down? Can we get more of it? Can we extend the moment?

We live in the present, but what is the present? How long is the present? Is the amount of time that constitutes the present something you can measure? Is it some fraction of a second? If we can experience it, must it not have parameters?

Is the point between the past and the future infinitely small?

We can see light and light has no mass. How many other things can you think of that don’t have mass? Thoughts? Love? Dreams?

Time?

My consciousness?

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Maybe the model I use to organize reality is ill equipped to handle questions like these. Models are always oversimplifications and they can send you down the wrong path.

I like the idea that this whole life might happen again. I like thinking that my life might play out again with only small changes. Maybe everything will be the same except one morning I’ll wake up and eat Raisin Bran instead of Frosted Flakes (although I have a hard time contemplating how I could ever choose Raisin Bran over Frosted Flakes).

Maybe there will be major changes. Maybe I’ll have three children instead of two in an alternate timeline. Maybe my consciousness will ride along in some other life. Maybe one of my kids will be the parent, and I’ll be the kid. Maybe I’ll be the dog.

Maybe I’ll spend more time with my friends from childhood who live close to me. Maybe I’ll make the deliberate decision to push all the distractions aside and spend more time focusing on individual moments.

Maybe…

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Perhaps it’s not for us to contemplate questions like “How long is the present?” It could be that the wisest thing is simply to recognize we’ll never know. The present is an eternal infinitesimal fragment of time. It’s a gift. It’s the point of impulse, the point of change, the point of motion.

Hearing from Charlie reminded me that I must use my present to act deliberately and spend time with the people I love the most. When I reflect on the best choices I’ve made in my life, I recognize that most of them were spontaneous.

Those were the moments I stopped fighting the current. Some lingering shadow of an awareness from another life must have been there to guide me.

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When your current timeline intersects with people from your past, it makes you realize that the past actually existed. The past was real. Perhaps that past still exists. Perhaps that past has some larger importance?

Someday our ability to speak and act and think and love and move will belong to the past. The spark will have moved on. But time is infinite, at least we think so. Perhaps it will wrap around to rouse us again.

In the meantime, call up your friends and go out for dinner. Infinity is a long time to wait.

If you’re reading these words, remember that you’re in the blazing heart of the infinite present. We spend our whole lives at the point of transition from the future to the past. But memories are as real as time. Make good ones.

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