I think if we pick apart the concept of time, the essence of waviness might be more clear.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is of the present moving past to future.

Yet 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.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise. With the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

Thus our intellectual obsession with form over substance.