Again, there is, in a class by itself, the year; it contains within itself all the divisions of time by the multiplication of which we get the total of life. The month is bounded by a narrower ring. The smallest circle of all is the day; but even a day has its beginning and its ending, its sunrise and its sunset.
Hence Heraclitus, whose obscure style gave him his surname, remarked:
“One day is equal to every day.”
Different persons have interpreted the saying in different ways. Some hold that days are equal in number of hours, and this is true; for if by “day” we mean twenty-four hours' time, all days must be equal, inasmuch as the night acquires what the day loses.
But others maintain that one day is equal to all days through resemblance, because the very longest space of time possesses no element which cannot be found in a single day—namely, light and darkness—and even to eternity day makes these alternations more numerous, not different when it is shorter and different again when it is longer.
Hence, every day ought to be regulated as if it closed the series, as if it rounded out and completed our existence.
I’m no good at waxing eloquent about the experience of time, and I find that the more I try to describe it in words, the further I get from understanding it. We speak of it as a thing, though it isn’t a thing at all. We divide it into all sorts of discrete units, and yet its continuous flow really has no parts. We treat it as an absolute, even as it seems to increase or decrease relative to the state of our own consciousness.
The best I can manage is that we perceive time as a measure of the constant process of change, from which no creature can be exempt. As soon as I try to pin down this very moment, it has already slipped away from me.
Some of our spans of time are taken from the cycles of nature, and others have evolved as human customs, but they are all attempts at quantifying an essential quality of our existence.
Struggling to identify the “now” reveals something about the fickle continuity of time. The present is something I am experiencing, and it simultaneously disappears. The past is something I have experienced, and it no longer exists. The future is something I may experience, and it does not yet exist. Only the presence of awareness can tie it all together into a unity.
With some intervals being longer, and others being shorter, we may assume that what is bigger is somehow better, while forgetting that any one instance is as complete within itself as any other. The year is no more important than the month, or the month than the day, with the wider circles only expanding upon what is already present in the narrower circles.
Yes, it hurts my head, probably because I am trying to think outside of something in which I am totally imbedded.
For practical purposes, the length of a day can serve as an ideal example of the structure of the whole being contained in the single part. The same pattern repeats itself over and over, only on a different scale, much like a fractal. There is the movement between light and dark, up and down, more and less, coming to be and passing away; once it ends it turns back and begins again. A day is like a life made miniature, a life like a day stretched out.
Heraclitus can indeed come across as rather cryptic, though it often helps me to remember that he is just making simple statements that nevertheless work on many levels.
Yes, one twenty-four-hour period is just as long as another twenty-four-hour period, and yet we will also find that all days undergo the same sorts of variations, and they are built up from the same common elements. I can rearrange the pieces however I like, and my existence remains a totality at any of those moments.
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