“Time Is Not Important Only Life Is”
“Time is not important, only life is important.”
That is the most famous quote from the 1997 movie “The Fifth Element” that I like the most.
When I heard it the first time in that movie, I was hit. At that age, I was merely a university student. Of course, I hadn’t experienced life in its full spectrum. Yet I was deeply touched.
I watched the movie time after time. Each time I had two questions:
What is time? And what is life?
Many people have tried to explain them. Maybe only a handful of them really know the truth but could hardly explain it in a way that a logical mind would understand.
I can’t answer these questions. And I think no one can answer them in languages. I realize that in my whole life, I will be seeking the answers. Maybe that is the purpose of life.
What I have observed is that all the stress and pressure in life is because of time, ultimately. That’s why no matter what stress relief methods you have tried, stress will come back.
Think about it, why is everyone striving to make more money and be rich? Why do people worry about diseases and want to get healed? Why do people want to live a better life?
Stress starts when people are competing with each other. Businesses and countries are competing with each other. For what? For limited resources. Why is resource limited? Because during a certain timeframe, any resource is limited.
It’s all because everyone knows that our time in this life is limited. Even if we stay healthy and wealthy, time still ticks away. Everyone is gonna die sooner or later. Anyone only gets limited resources of time, and therefore limited resources for everything else.
Time brings death to our doorstep, which is the ultimate pressure on every human being. Because we believe that once we die, our life ends.
So we believe that life and time come hand in hand. They go hand in hand too.
Is life timeless?
Whenever I thought about time and life, my mind generated more crazy questions.
Is it possible that life is not what we believe it is? Is it possible that life is not bound by time? Does it mean that life is timeless?
If life can be independent, why do people believe otherwise? What is it that time is bounding?
Obviously, everyone is controlled and run by time. Wake up, go to school, go to work, eat meals, go to sleep… Day by day, we are doing the same things over and over again. Just like the clock, we are running in circles.
If life is independent, what is it that time pushes to cycle? It is easy to understand that our body cycles. Every day we take in food and then recycle it into human waste. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide; that’s recycling. When we die, our body goes back to earth and recycles.
Does our mind cycle too? We keep thinking about our past and our future. Our mind always brings us back to the memories. And our memories bring up feelings and emotions and recycle the thoughts about what had passed or worry about what might happen in the future. So our mind cycles all the time.
If our life is independent of time, our body and our mind are not life itself. What is life then? What’s the connection between body, mind, and life?
Does time really exist?
Think about how we define time. From sunrise to sunset and from moonrise to moonset, we call it a day. When the moon completes a circle around the earth, we call it a month. When the earth completes a circle around the sun, we call it a year.
We, humans, define time based on the location of the sun, earth, and moon. Because of the physical movement, the relative position change creates the concept of time.
Is it possible that time only exists in our minds? Is it possible that time only applies to physical objects? Very much possible!
There are just too many questions in my head. I guess the key to solving all questions is TIME. It is time we need to transcend to be free from time constraints. If we can be free from time, our life can ultimately be free. It’s time to transcend!
Now we shall say: time is important, but life is more important.
