Do things or events make up our lives? Understanding the difference can have a profound impact on the quality of our lives and the relationships within them.
We recently read The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli and it prompted us to reexamine the notion of our lives through the exploration of time itself. What specifically caused this reexamination was how Rovelli posits two ways of thinking about the world.
We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.
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The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow.
Now that we know the difference between the two, our first inclination might be that both comprise our lives. We have experienced a kiss and we have held a stone.
Rovelli identifies the difference between the two as a component of time. Things persist. Events are fleeting. Or are they?
It’s All About Perspective
Persistence in time is dependent on perspective. As humans, we measure the passage of time in relation to certain cycles, such as a rotation of the Earth on its axis (a day), a revolution of the Earth around the sun (a year), and various fractions of each (seconds, minutes, and hours as portions of days; months and seasons as portions of years). We can clump years together into decades and centuries, but much more than that starts to lose relevance to a roughly average 80-year human lifespan. If we change perspective to Redwood trees, which can live thousands of years, clumping centuries together into millennia becomes applicable. Changing perspective the other way and considering the life of a housefly, which lives approximately one month, years are no longer a useful metric of time.
Stones have a life of their own, known as the rock cycle. Once formed, a rock will experience a series of events such as weathering and erosion. After enough weathering has occurred, the rock will cease to be. It is now a bunch of scattered sediments. The rock (stone) was fleeting, but longer lasting than a kiss.
As the main character in our own lives, we compare everything around us to how we perceive other things. That which tends to remain relatively constant over our lifespan, we call things. Those that are brief in occurrence and subject to perceivable change, we call events. Despite the tendency to call something that seemingly persists a thing, it is really an event.
Shifting the Perspective
What relevance does distinguishing events from things provide? In short, it shifts our perspective from one of false permanence to a realization of the component of time and its implications. Rovelli says, “The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. They are – if they are at all – in where but also in when.” Everything around us has a component of time to it.
This shift in perspective is not confined to obvious events like the aforementioned kiss. What if we expanded the kiss from a single physical act to something much more complex like love? Indeed, love is an event. It happens. People fall in and out of love. It has a beginning and an end, many times the end being till death do us part.
Thinking of love as an event should not scare us. The alternative is to think of love as a thing, which inherently means something we attain. Upon attaining love, feelings of euphoria often follow. A milestone has been reached. A checkbox has been marked. A new chapter of our lives is beginning. And it’s easy at first. But love requires work in order for it to last. When we experience hardships with love, we might panic if we think it is supposed to be constant. We don’t want to lose it! Considering love as a thing rather than an event jeopardizes our ability to have strong, fulfilling relationships.
Confusing the two applies to many other supposed things. A job, for instance, is also an event. You have a start date and an end date. It is not permanent. Likewise, retirement is an event. A company is an event. An investment is an event. A house is an event. Being a student is an event. Feeling happy is an event. Or sad. Or scared. Life is composed of events.
Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.
Rose Kennedy
Events are Experienced, Not Owned
Ultimately, seeing the universe as a collection of events reminds us of the temporality of everything. It reminds us to appreciate what we have while we have it and to work hard to keep the moments alive that are worth keeping. And it helps us let go when the time comes because, in the end, it was never ours to own. It was ours to experience.
Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. It is the only way that is compatible with relativity. The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. . . . The world is made up of a network of kisses, not stones.
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
