We Are Everywhere…. All At Once

The Oscar award-winning movie introduced many of us to the very strange concept that we are all living ‘everywhere all at once.’ If you haven’t seen it, the movie explores how moments, choices, and their consequences are interconnected across multiple dimensions and timelines. The multiverse serves as a narrative device to present different versions of reality where time behaves differently. 

Recently, I had the opportunity to experience time differently on a trip to Page, AZ, a small, non-descript town at the edge of Navajo country on the Colorado River. There, within perhaps a five-mile circumference of planetary space, co-exist several different time zones.  

Welcome to the Time Twilight Zone

There is Standard Mountain Time, observed by the town of Page, Mountain Daylight Time, observed by the nearby Navajo reservation, and then, once you cross over the bridge into Utah, you’ve got Mountain Time Zone, but you have to figure out if it’s Mountain Standard or Mountain Daylight since Utah observes both, but Arizona only observes one.  

So, you make a reservation to hike through Antelope Canyon on Navajo lands at 9 a.m., but in the town where you make the reservation, it’s already 9 a.m., so you can’t get somebody to pick you up at a designated time which is already ‘in the past’. So you make a plan to go across the bridge to see something at 10 a.m., arrive there at the designated time, and then have to wait two hours because it’s only 8 a.m. there at that moment. And like I mentioned previously, all of this takes place within a five-minute drive in one direction or another.

What’s the point of all of this? Everybody gets to determine what time it is for them, even if it doesn’t align with what their neighbors observe, just minutes away. This would suggest that time, in a sense is subjective– an agreed upon construct rather than an absolute truth. Perhaps time is subjective….until reality forces it to be otherwise.

The Curious Case of Sarah's 11:07

Have you ever known anyone who is never on time? It might not seem unusual, but I think it could be rare. I’ve encountered one such person in my Sunday morning yoga class. Everyone else  arrives on time for the class at 11 a.m., except for this one very nice lady, who I will call Sarah (to protect the innocent), who always arrives at 11:07, and not a minute earlier, or later.  

Her entrance is hard to miss, heralded by the distinctive click-clock of her wooden-soled shoes. After observing this for over ten years, I’ve come to realize that Sarah could actually arrive at 11:00 if she wanted to, she simply chooses to arrive on her own time. And it’s perfectly fine. In that moment, we are all still there, everyone, everywhere, at once, regardless of what the clock says. Sarah’s 11 o’clock is just everyone else’s 11:07. 

This brings to mind the idea that time is just a human construct based on a collectively held belief. When part of the collective no longer agrees on the concept of time, that construct begins to unravel. In Sarah’s world, time ticks differently.

The Power Struggle with Time

It seems to me that there is a bit of a power struggle and a lack of self-agency with the concept of time. After all, it wasn’t until just a few hundred years ago that most people in the world even observed strict time constraints. The importance of keeping time was announced when large clocks were invented, and hung on town halls and church steeples. The implication was that we had to arrive at church promptly at 9 A.M, not 9:07 A.M (although many still do that, too). 

After that, the nail was really driven in when one’s income became subject to our acceptance of the ‘suggestion’ to show up to one’s workplace at a certain time. As they say, the rest is ‘history’, even when it’s no longer ‘history’ because many of us now work from home, where time frames are shifting to and fro once again. 

That is what makes this little corner in Arizona so special to me. The residents here seem to have missed the clang of  church bells echoing through the centuries, its reverence upheld by middle managers of struggling businesses ever since, the idea that that we all must BE on time. 

And if we aren’t, do we cease to exist as  beings? Tell that to the Navajo Nation who have chosen not to be just like their townie neighbors down the road in Page, AZ.

This brings me back to the shift many of us experienced with working from home during COVID. Now that the pandemic seems to be behind us, both our preachers and our bosses are demanding that we get back to the pews and offices, like ‘before’. 

As I look around at half-empty downtown office buildings and grand places of worship all over the world, I can’t help but think,  some of us, like the Navajos, see time and the place where we are ‘supposed to be’ a bit differently now. Can I get an ‘Amen’?

One read on this situation is that our community is fraying because we are no longer on the same page, or even in the same time zone. I see it differently, because it’s possible to be together while also being apart in time and space. More thought and effort should be expended to collectively accepting what this  new ‘together’ might look like. It’s out there in space and time. Now, more than ever, it is possible to be “everywhere, all at once”, with technology. Seems like a pretty cool place in time to be!

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