I grew up around more horses and cattle, than people, so my sense of the cycles of life tends to be a little more objective, than when it's just the people you know coming and going.
The old gets crusty and the young has to push through it. Both being defined by it, but also learning and growing up through the biggest cracks.
The future is a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.
The parents are the medium, the kids are the massage.
As for the scary part, we are all mortal. As the old priest put it, the world comes to an end the day you die.
Having skated that edge enough times in my 63 years, there is definitely something radiating on the other side. Our current ideology is just too reductionist to be open to anything that can't be described in detail.
Consider that as these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It's the basis of culture and thus civilization, as narrative and physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. It is just that the function of culture is to synchronize our behaviors as one larger social organism, using the same languages, rules, measures, that it might seem there should be one universal, Newtonian flow of time, but it's just the energies bouncing around.
The energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.
Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorting the forms/information and the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
Thus the fact the mind is really just referee of the senses and desires, bubbling along.
Curiosity being the desire to learn everything. Eventually to realize an objective point of view is an oxymoron.
