For those few of you who read this blog regularly, you will notice I missed by usual Sunday "Modern Love" commentary (where I comment on the "Modern Love" column in the Sunday NYT; past examples here).  Instead, I was swept up in the weekend events of my 30th high school reunion.  It was the first time I had gone to such a celebration (I missed the 10th and 20th), and I was a bit apprehensive about how it would play out: what would it be like seeing people I had not seen in 30 years?  Would it be awkward and stand-offish?  Or would it be a rollicking good time?  I am happy to report it was the latter.  The five and a half hour dinner-dance rushed by as if it were an hour.  The re-gathering at a local bar that  stretched deep into the wee hours was loud and friendly and warm (I think of a Chinese term for having a good time, renao: "warm, loud").

    And the whole thing clarified for me a challenging aspect of Chinese cosmology (the definition and relationship of time and space).  More on that below the fold:

     First, a bit more description.  There were roughly eighty people there, out of a graduating class of about 275.  It was obviously a self-selected group: only the people who wanted to throw themselves into a reunion came; and, I imagine, those people were overwhelmingly comfortable enough with themselves to bear the scrutiny of high-school peers with questions lurking in the backs of minds ("what ever happened to…").  So, in a way, the event was bound to succeed because most everyone there wanted it to succeed.  Almost everyone was excited at the prospect of reconnecting with old acquaintances.

    But the night was not simply one of nostalgia.  We were not just living in, or trying to relive, the past.  What made it so fun was the sharing of a  moment in the present.  We laughed and drank and told stories and danced and made fun of one another in the immediacy of now.  We were not the same as we were but our present differences were complemented by our shared pasts.  The past and the present were occurring simultaneously.  The past had defined the present (our experiences 30 years ago are what established who was in the room) but the present was also defining the past (looking at each other now, we had a better understanding of whom we had been then).  This made the night quite fun but is also captures something about Chinese cosmology.

     In traditional China there was no creation myth (like the Biblical Genesis) and the universe was assumed to be timeless and self-generating.  From this perspective, there is a human dimension to time (the linear unfolding of a life: birth, youth, adulthood, demise, death) but there is also a broader cosmic dimension to time, where there is no "beginning" or "end," no distinction between past and present.  The human and cosmic times are not wholly distinct from one another.  We move out of cosmic time, in a rough sort of way, when we are born, and we move back into cosmic time when we die.  Timeless cosmic "time" surrounds and infuses our linear time-bound human existence.

    Here’s a line from Frederick Mote’s wonderful little book, Intellectual Foundations of China:

The cosmic process is one in which all stages are simultaneously present. (25).

I have always had a hard time imaging what this line might mean concretely.  How could all "stages" be "simultaneously present?"  Our Western linear sense of time makes it hard to envision such simultaneity.  But that is what the reunion did for me.  In a very real and immediate way two stages of my life which, up until that time, had been largely distinct from one another (very few of my old high school friends had much knowledge of what I do now) were occurring simultaneously.  And, if I think about it more, that is true for all moments of my life always.

     Now, perhaps my physicist friends (are you out there Jenkins?) can write to either confirm or reject this as a physical possibility.  But, even if they say it can’t happen, I won’t believe them.  I was there in the room and at the bar; and past and present were unfolding all at the same moment.  It could be ugly at times – as when drunken forty-eight year-old men started singing along to jukebox Eagles songs (not my choice!) – but, for the most part it was beautiful.