Without the ups and downs, it is a flatline.

The problem with time is 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 sense of time is as the present flowing 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, sound. 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.

Lives go birth to death, future to past, as life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old, past to future.

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

Emotions are temperature and pressure, rising and falling. Thoughts are the waves cresting, complete and total, but then receding...

It is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals coalescing out of the noise, centripetally contracting. With the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, toward infinity, as the resulting structures synchronize and coalesce inward, toward equilibrium. Both entropic.

As my mother would put it, tripping the light fantastic.

Nodes synchronize, networks harmonize.

We are fluctuations in the middle, between infinity and equilibrium. Black body radiation and black holes.