To live outside the frame of time

Reflections after watching Interstellar

Interstellar

I came to know the movie Interstellar first through its beautiful soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. Its “Main Theme” I purchased as piano sheet music to play. I was living in New York when the movie came out. There were a lot of posters up at bus stops: a desolate and dark landscape of space with Anne Hathaway or Matthew McConaughey in a space suit. At the time I thought it was a funny casting.

This past weekend I watched it for the first time when it became available on Netflix, and it was stunning. The grand visuals accompanied by the rolling crescendos and dark resonating chords of the musical scores, the poignant human stories, and dialogue that hit home. As an aside, I am amazed at the depth of Matthew McConaughey’s acting skills. I associate him with rom-coms, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and The Wedding Planner, and the Lincoln car commercial. The two most recent works with him that I’ve seen have held a different tenor altogether, the other being True Detective.

A scene from the movie. The space ship Endurance, a blip of light as it flies by Saturn.

The unstoppable force of time

At the center of the plot is the passage of time and the futility of trying to control this. Matthew McConaughey’s character “Coop” leaves his two children behind to be raised by his father-in-law, their only remaining living relative. He does so in the hopes of locating a new planet for humans to live on, specifically a place for his children. The Earth is literally dying, unable to sustain any crops except for corn, which will soon also become unsustainable.

I was drawn into the pain and regret that he experiences as his voyage into space inevitably extends further and further into the lives of his children while he remains youthful and unchanged. To hurtle through space and time is to be preserved in his youth relative to his children’s aging back on Earth. There is a moment in the movie, he is visibly anguished as an exploratory trip onto a planet ends in tragedy and not much else. One hour on the planet was equivalent to seven years on Earth. His children have aged 23 years in what was three hours for him. One of his companions, Dr. Brand played by Anne Hathaway retorts with frustration, “I screwed up, I’m sorry! But you knew about relativity.”

Life in measures of texture rather than time

This week I was sitting with a patient who shared feelings of grief and regret around the loss of time in a toxic relationship. They spoke of loss of time in a way akin to loss of life. It evoked for me Coop’s desperation for his mission to succeed so that he could return home and try to recoup the decades “lost” with his children. That slippery feeling of time indifferently passing by with no rewind or back button.

It stirred up wonderings about how to conceive of life outside the measure of time, what would that look like. I think about the many patients-clients I have seen with similar regrets of looking back and wishing they had done something different, a feeling of life lost. Yet if there is anything I have learned in my work, it is that a life “well-lived” or a “good life” is not how we may see it depicted in our culture through advertisements and media, through teachings in school, and through what is implicitly or explicitly communicated growing up in our family contexts. Life is often depicted as a kind of linear progression against time, of reaching milestones that are understood in terms of happiness, contentment, acquisition of material goods and comforts, and health and longevity.

I think about an alternate measure of life to be the richness and textures of life, rather than these milestones that hold an implicit judgment as markers of a good life.

In recent years I have come into a realization that my life is not a sacred thing to be protected from discomforts. Rather life is about discomfort, the inevitability of this and other greater experiences such as grief, loss, pain, anguish, disillusionment, and alienation. There are experiences that may not resolve in a lifetime and continue on as part of the fabric of one’s life. Such experiences do not impinge on what would otherwise be a “perfect” life, they are the richness that composes a life. There is not necessarily a reason for why they happen, they simply are.

I comment sometimes to Raghav of what it would have been like to have had an alternate life like that of Jimi Hendrix. A short life with intensity of experience and undoubtably with different textures that I will not experience in my own.

Life in the measure of love

I paraphrased a quote from Dr. Brand that moved me. The team must make a high stakes and very difficult choice. They have enough fuel only to visit one of two remaining planets that may be hospitable to life. Dr. Brand is in love with the scientist who initially voyaged 10 years ago to one of these planets in hopes of finding a life-sustaining environment. She still harbors the hope that they can be reunited against all odds and makes this heart-wrenching plea of why go to this planet over the other.

“Maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful. We love people who have died. Maybe it’s an artifact of higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”

At least for me, so much of what I wonder about of life comes back around to love and connection. That to be human is to be born for love (borrowing words from Dr. Bruce Perry here). I felt inspired by this idea of love as transcendent of time and space, and will continue to reflect on this and carry it forward with me.