Aubade #16 – Everything is Already Here
If you wish to avoid unnecessary frustration or distress, it may not be worthwhile to invest your time in reading it. An aubade composed after a sleepless night. It's obvious I haven't slept, so the writing is a bit crazy. But I want this theory to remain, fixed to this specific moment on the timeline. Time. Sleep! Sleep consumes a significant portion of my time! Sleep! How I hate you! Ooooh, how I love you!
Pulled an all-nighter… barely made it, dawn just broke. Now I know I’ll go to bed early tonight and fix my routine. Perfect! I pushed through! I’ve got hot tea with lemon in a thermos to kill the beginnings of this cold. The rough clack of the keyboard is pounding my brain (gotta replace this thing, damn it).
The truth is, I’m terrified of time. Sleep steals half our lives (that bastard). Sleep is like a toxic lover – I love it so much, and I hate it so much at the same time. We’re always complaining about time, right? It’s leaving, it’s outpacing us, it’s eating us alive, it’s never enough. We’re always running somewhere, just trying to catch up to something.
But what if…
What if time doesn’t exist at all?
No, seriously. Not as some philosophical flirtation, but as a physical fact. What if “past,” “present,” and “future” are just an illusion our brain creates so we don’t go insane?
I imagine that the entire universe – from the Big Bang to the final entropy – is one, gigantic, motionless sculpture. One, infinitely complex, frozen second.
Everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will happen is already here. Simultaneously. My birth, this hot tea, the thermos, my first words, my last breath – it’s all just different parts of this one gigantic, motionless sculpture.
Exactly. And this “present” of ours, this moment we’re experiencing, is really nothing but the “render” of that sculpture. I imagine this entire motionless universe is one gigantic, infinitely detailed digital file that already exists on some cosmic server. And our consciousness is the graphics processor, processing this file frame by frame, pixel by pixel, and displaying it on the “screen” of our perception. Our “life” is the real-time loading process of this grandiose scene. We aren’t creating the future – we’re just loading the part that wasn’t visible yet.
So, why do we feel like we’re moving? Why does it seem like time is “flowing”?
Because we are the thing that’s moving. Consciousness. Our brain created this dimension, just like everything else.
Our consciousness is a tiny beam of light traveling through this infinite, frozen crystal. The “past” is just the part the light has already hit. The “future” is what’s still in darkness. But it exists. It’s already there. We just haven’t reached it yet.
We aren’t the river; we are the flashlight moving over the surface of a frozen ocean.
And you know what this means for us? For artists?
It means we don’t create anything. Nothing at all. We just find it.
My best melody, the one I think I’m supposed to write “tomorrow”? It already exists. It’s part of that gigantic sculpture, just sitting in the dark. My job isn’t to “invent” it. My job is to be brave enough to point the light of my consciousness into that dark corner and discover it.
We aren’t creators. We are cosmic archaeologists. We are digging up what is already there.
Every “inspiration” I get? That’s not the birth of something new. That’s just my flashlight beam hitting a previously unseen, brilliant pattern on this motionless structure.
So, that fear of not getting things done? Of running out of time? It’s bullshit. Everything is already here. Everything is already mine. My only job is to hold that fucking flashlight and not be afraid to shine it in the darkest places.
That’s where my masterpieces are hiding. That’s where my life is.
They’re just waiting for me to find them.