Simultaneity

Woody Allen is credited with saying that "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."  Our land travels in Southeast Asia, on the heels of our sailing adventures across the Pacific, seem to put the lie to this sentiment.  My overwhelming sensation here in Thailand -- both in Bangkok, and now, in the provincial capital of Khorat, is that everything, in fact, does happen at once:  vibrantly-colored buses, overhead SkyTrains, cars, taxis, pushcarts, tuk-tuks, pedestrians, street vendors, monks, and uniforms of every shade of tan all seem to move, Brownian-like, in a steady and simultaneous sea down clean-swept, soot-blackened streets, all at once, somehow managing to avoid collision.

As we weave in and out of these crowds, carried along as much as making our own way, I recall the dusty path in Tonga, where a woman was walking home after mass; the young couple starting their dive business in Taha, bringing along their toddler with his own mask and fins; the soccer-story-telling guide on the Galapagos island of Isabela, and his frequently-professed love for his adopted island home; the disheveled Volvo mechanic in Tahiti, who fixed our engine; the uninhabited and landless atoll Beveridge Reef, with its circle of breaking Pacific swells; the sea cucumber fishermen of the Ha'apai group; the musician-sculptors of Fatu Hiva -- I recall each of these, and it's plain to me that, contrary to Woddy Allen's adage, in fact everything DOES happen at once, and that time matters only in the place it is measured.  In physics, this is the frame of reference made famous by Einstein's train station thought experiments -- to the passenger, the station is moving, and to the stationmaster, the train is moving. 

If we live in one place, if we see only one place, if we organize our perspective around one place, then only one thing happens at a time, but that's not the way of the world, or, as it turns out, the universe. Everyone sees the world around him or her move; the observer is stationary, and is challenged to consider an alternate view of the world.  For me, traveling by sea and land, it's been only slightly less of a challenge to consider these alternate views than if I were in one city, at one job, with one perspective.  For me, this nugget -- multiple frames of reference, each valid, each present at the same time -- has been worth exploring. 

Adopting a more scientific perspective, the physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently wrote of this phenomenon in his book The Grand Design.  In it, he explains in clear language that the cosmos does not have just a single existence, or history, but rather that every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously.  We humans like to think that we are unique, but he makes the case that we have organized our thinking to make this centric perspective the (too) easy explanation.  In fact, modern quantum theory points to an infinite number of parallel universes, each with its own reality, formulas, and, anthropomorphically, its own creatures.

Our travels across 40% of this globe have barely touched on the variety of cultures and geographies -- we're on a boat-borne journey, and harbors and seasides have a certain sameness of being.  Traveling inland into Thailand has been a signal shift in our perspective -- here, peoples exist apart from the ocean and thoughts of boats, fish, and sailors, and here, it's clear that as we sail on a small boat across a big ocean, in our own reality, measuring time by the movement of stars across a night sky, other realities exist at the same time, in other universes, moving to their own calendars.  This simultaneity of existence is a hard idea to hold on to for me; like many of us, I spend most of my mental energy thinking about me and my immediate space:  my wife and partner, my boat, the next wave, the approaching cloudline.  Finding the space to hold the image of a Tongan mother or a Thai tuk-tuk driver for more than a few seconds is impossible for me.  It's only when I reflect on the phenomena of simultaneity that I can grasp the insight that eludes me constantly:  everything is happening at once, at the same time, everywhere, and if only we perceived the connections between these simultaneous events, we could move with greater wisdom through the universes -- the frames of reference -- of our own creation.

One of the many blessings I've enjoyed on this journey has been the time and space to read books.  I read my share of murder mysteries and the like, but through the miracles of book swaps and Kindle, I have managed to read some pretty interesting books, several of which touch on this concept of simultaneity.  One author, David Mitchell, embraces the concept artfully in his books Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas where, in each, he crafts a series of stories connected in the most tangential of ways to create a multi-location (Ghostwritten) and multi-generational (Cloud Atlas) plot line where seemingly-disconnected lives and events combine to form compelling stories of individual choices, lives, and consequences.  Another author, William Gibson (Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010), examines the economic and cultural consequences of 21st century capitalism, and writes beautifully about a world connected neurally through the internet even as people struggle to maintain a balance between local culture and global awareness.

In one, the author explores the concept of connectedness; in the other, the struggle between connectedness and a manageable frame of reference.  One is essentially optimistic; the other, pessimistic.  I'm not sure whether attaching a value to the concepts is helpful, but internalizing the concepts as I travel across different cultures is surely helpful.

In Thailand, I've felt both phenomena: awareness of how my life has connected lives in remote islands in the South Pacific with lives in urban Bangkok, as well as the tension between "thinking globally and acting locally."  We've been here less than a week, and we've got three more weeks in Vietnam before returning to Australia, but already, I'm really glad we came here.  Sometimes it's not the journey itself, but the changing destinations -- the repeated reminder of different frames of reference operating simultaneously -- that yields the learning.