Great title, right?

Especially for us old science fiction fans.

Full of promise, hinting at unfolding futures, wrapped in mystery.

But consider this: It's where you live.

It's where we all live.

The most mundane things we do happen on the Edge of Now.

So why doesn't science, modern physics, seem to understand this? Is it because mathematical formulas treat time as a continuum, running equally forward and backward, encompassing both past and future? Is it something we are taught in school and aren't allowed to question?

Where to start to find an example of this Edge of Now? Consider the moment of waking up, emerging from dreamland. Dreamland may be the closest we can come to living in the future. It's a realm of possibilities, often similar to our reality, but more malleable, shifting from one scene to the next in ways that simply don't happen when we're awake.

Or do they?

Consider a moment when you don't quite know what will happen next. What will you see when you open that door, turn on that light, or simply shift your eyes and your attention?

Or consider a moment when you're looking up into a light rain. Will the next drop that hits your face fall on your cheek? your nose? your eye?

Or when you're combing your hair. Will the comb catch a snag? Where?

Or when you're driving your car. Will the next oncoming car be a Chevy? a Ford? a Toyota?

Many moments present multiple possibilities. So much so that we learn very early to expect the unknown, the unexpected, take it in stride. It's where we live.

Every moment presents us with possibilities. Whether expected or unexpected, they all have one thing in common. They haven't happened yet. Everything we see, everything we experience in any way, emerges from the quantum realm, the realm of the possible, the realm of the future.

Much, even most of it, is actually quite reliably expected. After all, each Now emerges from an almost identical previous Now. Yet it all remains to a degree uncertain until it happens.

What this tells us, I think, is that the universe as a whole, all of spacetime, the entire realm of the possible, the mind of God if you will, presents us with many individual possibilities. We string these individual possibilities together into a unique sequence of experiences that describe our own little corner of that universe. That, and nothing more. The rest is left for someone (or something) else to observe.

So here we are, occupying our own unique Now. From here we may look back upon the events of our unique past experiences. Or we may look forward to the next possible, even probable, often inevitable, unique event to come.

Which will immediately become only the latest link in the long chain of our past. A past in which we may detect hints of possible future choices, from which we may, Now, begin to construct our own future story. Until it too, inevitably, begins to construct itself. If we let it.

It can be easy to surrender to that vast, overwhelming, exterior Now, and simply drift from moment to moment, accepting whatever little bit of it that we are faced with.

We all have friends who live in very similar Nows to ours, who remember very similar narrowly delineated pasts, who expect to experience very similar future Nows that will also retreat into very similar past experiences. Many of those friends simply accept whatever comes their way.

Or we, and they, can remember that it always remains in our power to be at least a slight, gentle cause over our own future. Assessing each small choice we are offered, and accepting the next Now that we find most agreeable.

It's actually pretty clear that this is how life actually works. All of life.

It's nice to know that.