Just a Moment

Another song I played at my 50th birthday party was one very important to me: Just a Moment. The very reason I went to so much trouble and expense to have such a big party was because I wanted to have a moment in time where everyone who loved me would be with me in one room, and I got as close as I possibly could to having it.

I have a theory of time that orders my life and provides me with the faith to endure as much as I can the passing of time and helps me to fill even moments of tedium and impatience with a spark of the eternal. This theory is based on the idea that time begins in the present moment, rather than in the past.

Time begins, as it does in actual experience,
in the present moment,
and on this I have chosen to rely

It’s not some antique philosophical conception
a bang before all time
that you can measure like a simple length of string

If you switch the ideas about all time beginning
From past to present moment
You'll understand the bang is nowhere but our now

Time… Is nothing but a moment
It’s what’s going down
And it’s happening to you

Time… Going backwards going forwards
Infinitely outward
From an omnipresent now

We can’t get any closer
To the current state of time
We listen to impressions
Of the bang of now behind
Sooner of later
Our conceptions of linear time
Become a strong illusion
Called the arrow of time

Time… Like a wasp stuck in amber
Is a fossilized fragment
of a moment called now

Time… Existing solely in the present
We’re all presently recording
Every memory of now

If you disconnect the dots you
Might lose yourself in time
Our construct is our lifeline
The timeline is our mind
But regarding pure physics
It could happen at any time
The consensus will be shifting
To this moment in time

It's more than just a moment, really. It's every moment all at once in one. My very faith in existence stems from nothing more than the knowledge that there is a now, and there was a now, and now is all we'll ever see.

After reading an incredible book called "Time: The Familiar Stranger" I became very interested in time, and set aside my former cock-assed theory (all of my theories are arguably cock-assed, of course) that you couldn't go faster than the speed of light forwards but you could go faster than the speed of light backwards, which I made up because I thought it was really funny on a trip with my friends in 1978.

The patient and digestible way the author presented the concept of time is actually a mental construct that is extremely hard to verify using anything other than another mental construct became quite real to me, even though I continued to order my life around the idea that there are three states of time: past, present and future. You can't really get a thing done without using these concepts to order your life, and I'm a practical person.

But a great deal of thinking on the subject over the years led me to reject the idea of the future existing. Even if you were able to see all time outside of time, much like we can see incredibly far into the past by simply glancing up at starlight. I decided that the future can't exist, even outside of time, because it hasn't been created yet. Time begins in the present moment, and persists in the past, or else we wouldn't get to see starlight from millions of years ago.

This song was recorded at Soft Sound Studios by Fo Jammi, who also played piano and mixed it. I played the guitar and bass, Bill Morris played the drums, and Mark Gray played the incredible, otherworldly guitar solo that snakes throughout the piece.

Download Just a Moment.

 

 

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