“JAMAIS VU,” PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
I learned some French recently– well, just one phrase, to be honest. The phrase is “jamais vu,” and it translates literally to “never seen.” Not to be confused with its opposite “deja vu,” or “already seen,” jamais vu refers to a moment in time where the familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar, as though never experienced. These are moments where we find ourselves deep in the routines of life and without warning it all feels new, fresh like we’ve never been there before. I was struck by how more and more often, the experience of jamais vu is getting into my life. It’s a far less discussed phenomenon in comparison to deja vu, but I’m starting to see it as more common in my own life. Not only that, but the realm of physics would tell us that every moment of our life is jamais vu, truly.
Most of the way we think about life is repetition, patterns, and cycles. I sleep in the same bed every night. I sit in the same driver’s seat of my car, run the same routes in the street, and sit in the same office chair over and over and over. On a grander scale, consider how we measure time as a species. Every year, we find our planet in the same position as this point last year. The only problem is that none of this is true.
Let’s start by talking about two things: “space” and “time.” By “space,” I’m talking about the thing we all move in measured by height, depth, and width. We see and talk about this space as a very concrete thing that we can interact with as we’d choose. Walk around, stand still, jump up and down, as fast or as slow as you want. That’s moving in space. Part of being a human is having some agency in how we move in space.
Time is different. Time, like space, is a measurable thing that moves and that we interact with constantly; but unlike space, we don’t get to say how much or how little time we move through, and at what pace.
To us, space and time feel like very different and unconnected things. To physicists, however, space and time are not all that different and they are very connected. They are both measurable things that make up our reality. And just like we move across distances, we move across time. We cover the distance of seconds, minutes, and hours just like we cover inches, feet, and miles. And when we look at it from that perspective, we see that our planet is moving in a line more than it’s moving in a circle.
Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time (stay with me please God I beg you), brings attention to this idea. He agrees the way we often perceive our positions is cyclical (think planets around a sun). However, when time is a factor or measurement things are linear. Movement is in one direction, not in circles. Hawking writes, “The mass of the sun curves space-time in such a way that although the earth follows a straight path in four-dimensional space-time, it appears to us to move along a circular orbit in three-dimensional space.”
Essentially what that means is that we are always moving forward through time, which doesn’t feel like that novel of an idea, at least until you consider some implications. If time is a factor like distance in which we measure movement, we are never in the same place twice. Ever.
When we go to bed at night, it feels like something that’s happened a thousand times before in the exact same place, but it hasn’t. It happened in a position in space-time that is 24 hours behind the current position. So while the place we lay feels like a repeat of what happened last night, if we view time as a forward direction we’re all traveling, it is a new event in a new place: the present. The places you walk over and over are truly new places when taking time into account.
For me, all of this culminates in a beautiful way of looking at the things of life that feel repetitive. When I find myself in situations that I feel like have nothing to offer me out of their mundane nature, I remind myself of the truth: I have never been here before. When I find myself in a conversation that feels oh so boring and meaningless, I remind myself: I have never been here before. When I’m sitting in my office chair doing work that feels purposeless and empty, I remind myself: I have never been here before.
New places awaken something in us: curiosity. And when we begin to see the places and faces common in our lives as if for the first time, we experience that curiosity as a doorway to deeper levels of understanding, hope, and love. The notion that every moment of life is a new moment is an invitation to humility, because we are all in a new place at the same time, and many of our assumptions about ourselves and each other are voided in this new space called the present.
May our perspective of the present be informed by the reality of time as a forward concept, an always pioneering concept, a constantly novel concept. May we see our stories on a forward trajectory, as part of a larger story moving in a forward trajectory. And most of all, may we look with fresh eyes and curiosity on the people and places we feel are no longer deserving of our wonder, to see that all of life is a deep well of newness and transformation available to us in the now. Jamais vu.