I've been thinking a lot about the
nature of time recently and I've come to realize the following:
Often people think how far away the moment that happened in the past is important and that it can some how be undone if it wasn't all that long ago. It's like when you say something and then realize you shouldn't have said it, but the damage is already done and even if it's just a second past you already have to deal with the consequences and can't just re-do that moment. That moment is just as gone as a year ago is.
At the same time, the farther away the moment gets the easier it is to deal with. You lose the feeling of it being close enough to taste but still gone and you learn to live with whatever happened. The time for damage control passes and you keep going from where ever you are.
It's been said that time isn't really linear and we're just limited by our perception and because we're limited by linear perception everything we create is as well. Kurt Vonnegut best tackles the idea in Slaughterhouse Five with Billy Pilgrim and the idea that he'd come unstuck in time. The problem with accepting a view of time like that is that we'd never be really able to change a moment and that we could go through them again but never really have free will. If we were able to change these moments you wouldn't be able to put time in any sort of line at all as we are able to now and travel up and down it, it would be more of a jumble and the "past" and "future" would change every time and you would never be able to travel back to a previous "future" because you changed its past.
And with that tangle of words I return to my thoughts as I travel into my future, never to experience this moment again.