Time is relevant but what exactly relevancy means when globally everyone is experiencing a massive shift of their lives. Every person in every country, city and house went through a dark time because pandemic seized the freedom we always took for granted. Time is ever changing but still it moves at a constant rate. Relevancy of time changes our perception of it personally but not externally. So what paradox we experienced in 2020?
Time has fixed points, past, present and future, we cannot change them. We can travel in any direction in space but never in time. 2020 was a year of freedom paradox. There was no free will of movement but we still had it. This paradox forced us to go to the only place we rarely visited, ‘’our own selves’’.
The Grandfather paradox or the simply the retro-suicide happened in all of us; some might become aware of it, some might be not. It is a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge as we change past by time travelling. Physically it is impossible to time travel to kill our younger self and remove our existence which would create alternate dimension where we do exist. Just like time, our being is infinite as well; we can change our thoughts, perceptions, opinions or lifestyle and kill our past self. 2020 forced the globe to change how people behaved, how businesses developed. Everything became online; everyone was in a casual loop or bootstrap paradox of being stuck in past ways but at the same time grabbing new opportunities and exploring new mediums to create worldwide businesses by sitting in one room. This paradox can cause the undetermined origins of traditions in coming generations.
If the physical laws of this world are autonomous, we are not free; if we are free, then the physical laws are not autonomous.- Norman Swartz
Theory of presentism seems suitable for this year, neither past nor future exist. This Galilean relativity, in which time is independent of space, surrounded all of us at some point in 2020. Presentism made us explore our own potential spiritually and mentally. World became more accepting of change, to new or queer ideas, started to give more value to morals, and many small online businesses emerged, people started to appreciate more art and creativity of doing something even if we are restricted in most ways.
This year broke the major concept of getting education by being physically present in any institute. Hybrid education is the new facility that we accepted in this year. More and more people became interested in spiritual concepts of meditation and self acceptance. World now seems in heterological paradox, where the world we knew does not describe as we know it.
This major global shift is new in every way and we cannot predict how new tech and being this dependent on it would affect us in long run. How all of these paradoxes would create a new generation of new thoughts and values. 2020 made coming years enclosed in Necker Cube, where there are unpredictable subjective changes but there is one thing we do know that understanding of consciousness and spiritual awakening changed some people this year. This butterfly effect can have a big and complex impact but at the same time social media seems to create a more digitally aware and connected world. World is in a transitional period of more tech advanced empires and traditions. Maybe next global change would be a transfer towards tradition as it is towards technology today.
Najwa Aziz is a graphic designer, visual artist and a researcher with an interest in theology, cosmic creativity and sentience of internal existence through exploration of art, philosophy and scientific theories about objective reality.