I think the big stumbling block is our perception of time. As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, like a motion picture, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. codified as measures of duration.

The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Potential>actual>residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.

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.

It's bit like a geocentric cosmology, in that our subjective experience is a mirror effect of the larger dynamic.

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 go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Given that consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions giving it form and structure go future to past, but that it's the digestive system processing the energy, the nervous system sorting the information and digestive system as feedback in the middle, there is an intellectual focus on the patterns over the processes generating them. Especially the sequential patterns.

Consider that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in and it might give some hint to the relationship of the particles to the fields, as the wave tendency is to synchronize, while the energy harmonizes.