Creating Time

By Jessica Lake

I live in the now.

That sounds philosophical.

It isn’t.

I have SDAM. I have no meaningful episodic memory. I know my past, but I cannot return to it. I cannot relive yesterday, last year, childhood, marriage, love, grief, accomplishment.

They are things I know.

Semantic knowledge.

And my semantic knowledge has no felt time axis.

I studied martial arts.

I studied ballet.

I was married.

I raised a child.

I worked as an engineer.

They are facts.

They don’t feel thirty years ago or yesterday. They don’t arrive carrying their position in time. I can sometimes determine when something happened, but that is another fact.

The past does not extend behind me.

It simply isn’t there.

The future presents a similar problem.

I also have aphantasia.

I cannot picture myself tomorrow. I cannot construct a scene and put myself into it. I cannot populate next year with people and places and possibilities. I cannot take an experienced past, extend its trajectory forward, and imagine the person I might become.

So, experientially, there is now.

And that’s a peculiar place to live.

Because humans seem to require movement.

We anticipate.

We learn.

We prepare.

We become.

Evolution would seem to have considerable use for an animal oriented toward what comes next. An organism that can alter its behavior today to improve its circumstances tomorrow has an obvious advantage.

But how do you move forward when there is no felt past behind you and no imaginable future ahead?

How do you create a time axis where there isn’t a felt one?

I think I know.

Recently, I went camping at Macedonia Brook State Park.

I hiked a difficult trail and encountered a rock scramble.

I managed it.

Barely.

It required things I wasn’t particularly good at. High step-ups. Flexibility. Balance. Supporting myself with my arms. Lifting much of my weight with a single leg.

I came home from what should have been a lovely camping trip with an inventory of deficiencies.

Then, at the gym, I started doing step-ups.

Of course I did.

And suddenly I recognized an ancient pattern.

At least by human standards.

This is how I have approached nearly everything in my life.

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Perfect.

Adapt.

Stabilize.

That’s it.

Something disrupts the existing configuration.

That is my stable self.

I become obsessed with it. It tears me apart.

So I tear it apart.

I find the weak links.

I dwell on those near failures rather than the skills I do well.

I repeat and refine until the new ability becomes embedded performance.

Then the system stabilizes. I am at ease.

And I start to twitch.

Itching for the next destabilization.

And eventually something arises—a destabilization.

I had always understood this as my way of solving problems, whether life’s or an engineer’s.

Today’s Jessica wonders whether this has another function entirely.

I suspect this is how I create a time axis.

⸻

I practiced martial arts for two decades.

Achingly, I grew very good.

Then I hit a brick wall.

I stopped improving.

Age was beginning to push me in the reverse direction. I bemoaned the decrepitude. So long I had labored in the shadows. And now for Father Time to wrest it from my grasp?

I am not ready to age.

There are still the Olympics.

Am I not the Chosen One?

My options were dismal. I could continue to practice. I could watch my skill diminish. I could teach the next generation.

Most of my peers did exactly that.

Me?

I moved to Manhattan, the dance capital of the world.

Again, it took ages, but I arrived just in time for Father Time to snatch it.

’Tis not too late to seek a newer life.

Decades later, I visited some of the people I had trained with at a summer picnic. My classmates were still there. They still practiced. They taught. They enjoyed the art, enjoyed one another, enjoyed the advancing generations.

I had abandoned my past.

Why?

I misunderstood, as is my habit.

I was no longer progressing.

I was regressing.

Gradual decline.

There were so many newer, richer fields.

So I took up dance.

I was a newbie.

How wonderful!

How liberating!

There was an enormous distance between what I could do and what I wanted to do.

I tore movements into their constituents. I obsessed over the intermediates. I exercised and stretched specifically for whatever I isolated as deficient. I repeated things endlessly until they became fully embedded in muscle memory.

I improved.

And the years passed.

Then, around fifty, substantive improvement became rare. I was plagued by leg cramps. Quick movements were beyond me.

Eventually, I was declining.

One class, I was with Brian. For me, a true tortured soul. Wise, funny, and fun to drink with.

There was this woman who attended class. She seemed to dwell in a world of denial.

More obstacle than dancer.

“Brian? Do you think we will know when it is time to let it go?”

“Obviously not.”

I think that was my last dance class.

I never noticed the regularity in my surrender.

I did not leave dance or martial arts because I lost my love.

I left because:

“This is getting me nowhere.”

Wiser and much older, I see something hiding in that short phrase.

Getting me nowhere.

Time.

Or at least its substitute.

I cannot experience an autobiographical time axis in the ordinary way.

I can stand in the present, but not with a lived past that stretches like a tail behind me. Nor can I imagine a life extending ahead.

But I can sense an anomaly that exists now.

Something untrustworthy.

This is what is wrong with it.

This is what I can change.

This is what should happen if I change it.

There it is.

A time axis.

Current state → discrepancy → intervention → changed state.

I don’t have to see the future state.

I don’t have to imagine myself inhabiting it.

I don’t even have to leave the present.

Everything necessary to construct the future exists now.

I can understand a machine.

If this gear turns, that shaft will turn.

Change this component and the machine will behave differently.

I can understand my body the same way.

This movement is weak.

Strengthen it.

This range is insufficient.

Work on it.

This technique fails here.

Decompose it.

Practice the pieces.

Reassemble them.

Repeat.

The future is implicit in the causal relationship.

I cannot imagine Future Jessica standing on that rock at Macedonia.

I don’t need to.

If I change A, B should become possible.

That is enough.

⸻

Perhaps that is why improvement has always mattered to me so much.

And perhaps that is why there is so little rest in it.

There is never much good enough.

Good enough means stable.

Stable means there is no discrepancy.

No discrepancy means there is nothing to optimize.

And without change, my peculiar time axis disappears.

Other people may be able to remain.

They can continue practicing martial arts for forty years. They can enjoy their competence. Their friends. Their history with the place.

The accumulation itself may have value.

Perhaps continuity can be an experience.

For me, continuity is semantic.

I have done this for forty years.

Another fact.

But give me something I cannot do—

Now something happens.

There is a difference between what I am and what I could become.

There is Δ.

And Δ has direction.

I don’t think I experience time moving forward.

I experience change moving forward.

That may be the distinction.

⸻

This makes the obsessive phase look different too.

It is easy to describe it as perfectionism.

Maybe sometimes it is.

But obsession also creates a densely inhabited present.

There are questions.

Possibilities.

Experiments.

Failures.

Corrections.

Intermediate states.

The present suddenly contains a relationship with something that does not exist yet.

I am building toward it.

For someone who cannot remember herself moving through the past and cannot imagine herself occupying the future, that may be extraordinarily important.

It creates becoming.

And becoming creates time.

⸻

That may explain why the rock scramble at Macedonia affected me so strongly.

At seventy-four, much of the language surrounding the body concerns preservation.

Maintain your strength.

Maintain your balance.

Prevent decline.

Keep what you have.

That is sensible advice.

It is also, for me, psychologically barren.

Maintenance doesn’t go anywhere.

Then I encountered a pile of rocks that I was bad at climbing.

Wonderful.

There were weaknesses.

There were things to learn.

There were capabilities I did not possess.

I could be different.

The rock did not say:

You can’t do this anymore.

It said:

You can’t do this yet.

And yet contains a future.

⸻

So perhaps my endless cycle is not merely a personality quirk.

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Optimize / Perfect.

Adapt.

Stabilize.

Then begin again.

I cannot preserve the journey afterward as lived experience.

When it is finished, it collapses into knowledge.

I learned.

I changed.

I became good at it.

The time disappears.

But while the process is happening, I can experience its direction.

I know where I am.

I know what is deficient.

I know what I am changing.

And I know that the consequence of changing it lies somewhere ahead.

For a while, there is a before and an after.

Not remembered.

Not imagined.

Constructed.

Maybe that is what I have been doing all my life.

Creating a future from inside the present.

Creating a time axis in a mind where there otherwise isn’t one.

Change is how I experience becoming.

And becoming is how I make time move.