When Time Passes, but Does Not Happen

Predicting the future seems like an arrogant act. It is associated with astrology, with prophecies, with delusions of control. But if one pauses for a moment, something strange appears: the immediate future is trivially predictable. It is enough to observe that the world continues.

Newton formulated this with brutal clarity in his First Law: every body remains at rest or in uniform motion unless compelled to change its state by an external force. That sentence, presented as a school detail of classical mechanics, is in fact an ontological structure. It does not only describe how objects behave; it describes how reality is sustained.

Our psychic stability depends on this minimal regularity. If every second were a lottery in which physical laws could arbitrarily change, no subjective continuity would be possible. We would collapse.

At this very moment, anyone reading these lines can be reasonably certain that the next second will be extremely similar to the previous one. Not because life is safe, but because continuity is the rule. Change is the exception. Predicting the immediate future is not about guessing chaos, but about recognizing the persistence of a stable frame.

This logic holds even after an accident. If you hit your finger, pain appears as a rupture. But the world does not collapse. The next second arrives just the same. It hurts, yes, but the body is still there, gravity still acts, air still flows. The system has not broken; it has incorporated a disturbance. The continuity of pain confirms the continuity of the laws. Action and reaction. Each moment chained to the previous one.

Here an interesting distinction appears. For physicists, time is a measure of change. Without change, there is no clock. But the time we experience as subjects does not depend on any variation whatsoever, only on those that alter our framework of meaning.

The present never disappears. There is always experience. But not every present changes what we believe possible, what we expect to happen, or who we believe ourselves to be. Some presents follow one another without altering our vital coordinates. In those stretches, time is lived but leaves no mark. In memory, it compresses until it is reduced to an anecdote or a loose image.

The clock moves forward, sometimes with effort, sweat, and tears. The body works, experience unfolds, but our position in the world remains intact. Nothing is redefined. Nothing shifts. Time passes, but it does not happen.

And yet everything changes all the time. At a microscopic scale, electrons jump states, molecules vibrate, matter transforms. The universe is in constant variation. But most of those changes do not count for us. Not because they do not exist, but because they do not modify our real possibilities for action. They are background noise.

Our consciousness functions as a filter. It registers only what alters what we can do, expect, or decide. We perceive stability because we ignore almost everything that varies. If we measured our life by the clock of the stars, many of our conflicts would lose all relevance. Not everything that occurs becomes an event.

It is useful here to distinguish two levels in the facts that shape our experience of time.

There are changes that do not alter our vital coordinates. These are incidents. They may hurt, disturb, or unsettle us, but they do not modify what we believe possible or the general direction of our actions. There is a before and an after, but no rupture. Continuity remains.

On the other hand, there are changes that do reconfigure our real possibilities. These are events. In a sense close to what Deleuze and Badiou have proposed, the event is not simply an intense fact, but that which inaugurates a new regime. Something that renders the previous framework insufficient and forces its reorganization.

The difficulty is that this distinction only becomes clear in retrospect. At the moment of living it, we do not know whether we are facing a passing incident or a breaking point that will transform our trajectory. Some incidents can accumulate and become an event. But most dissolve without altering anything essential.

This uncertainty is a deep source of anguish. We do not fear only change. We fear not knowing whether what is happening will change everything.

An argument, a call that never comes, or ambiguous news can alter our mood without changing the direction of our life. Even a rejection can hurt without altering our fundamental decisions. Everything continues under the same general conditions.

A trip, by contrast, may seem like an event because it introduces novelty and breaks routine. It changes the landscape, sensations, rhythm. But if upon returning our possibilities remain the same, it was an expansion of experience, not a real rupture. It becomes an event only when the return no longer fits into the life we had before.

An event occurs when something forces an irreversible turn: signing a contract that commits years, moving to another country, a definitive separation, a serious diagnosis, an unexpected dismissal, the death of someone close. It is the point at which something ceases to be possible and something new becomes inevitable. When what seemed an option becomes a condition.

If stability depended on controlling events, it would be impossible. The event, by definition, irrupts and forces a change of direction.

Security does not come from avoiding rupture, but from knowing that even after it, continuity persists. The world does not disintegrate. The course changes, but the ground that sustains it does not disappear.

After the event, another inertia begins. In another direction, yes. But stable again.

That continuity has a price.

Our biography is not written with the moments that simply pass, but with the ruptures that force us to redefine what we believe possible. Routine sustains identity, but in memory it compresses. The event, by contrast, densifies memory. The greater the reorganization it demands, the deeper its inscription in lived time.

However, not every event liberates. Some integrate and open new trajectories. Others remain fixed as warning, as wound, or as repetition. When rupture is not worked through, it reverberates. And that reverberation alters the perception of time: it installs anxiety, anticipates danger, turns the future into threat.

Stability protects. Rupture transforms. Neither is sufficient on its own.

A purely inertial life becomes almost invisible in memory.
A life saturated with ruptures becomes uninhabitable.

A life without ruptures can be calm, even enviable. But it risks leaving no trace in the one who lives it. And if in the end there were a moment to remember, there might be very little to reorganize, very little to narrate.

Life is rhythm between inertia and rupture.

We are not the sum of the days that pass, nor only of the fractures that marked us. We are the movement between continuity and change. Between what is sustained and what breaks.

And in that rhythm our way of being in time is at stake.

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