Take a blank sheet of paper and draw a horizontal line stretching from left to right. Now, draw a small vertical tick in the center of that line, dividing it in half. This line represents the timeline of our reality. Everything to the left of the tick represents the past, and everything to the right represents the future. The tick, therefore, represents the present.

The only problem with this illustration is that the tick has no place on the timeline.

The tick that you drew in the center of the line, representing the present, has a width, the width of the tip of the pen or pencil you used to draw it. It may sound silly or pedantic, but this is the point itself. The tick must not have any width at all, because it would occupy space on the timeline. On the left end of the timeline, write "-1h", and on the right end, write "1h". The timeline now captures all of the events in the last hour of your life and the next hour to come. Therefore, the line itself captures exactly two hours of time. If the present occupied any space on the line, it would have to borrow it from either the past or the future. For when the future becomes the past, it is completely seamless in the passage of time. Wedging anything between the future and the past would unravel time itself.

If you used a pencil to draw the tick, erase it. If you used a pen, flip the sheet over and draw another horizontal line from left to right. This time, fold the paper in half so that the crease runs vertical and intersects the horizontal line. The timeline is divided in half again, as before, but now the divider has no width. Everything to the left of the fold is the past, and everything to the right is the future. The present is now correctly nowhere to be found on the timeline.

What does this mean? I don't know. But it appears to mean that the present doesn't technically exist in the passage of time. It appears to mean that the present is not a duration but a transition—a fleeting boundary where change occurs, but which itself cannot be held or measured.

It is like the blade of a knife slicing through time, dividing what has already happened from what has yet to come, without ever being part of either. We live our entire lives balanced on this imperceptible edge, experiencing reality as a continuous stream of moments that vanish the instant they arrive. If the present cannot be found on the line, perhaps it's not a point in time at all, but rather the awareness of time passing.

And if the present is awareness, then it is not something in time, but something outside of it—an observer, not a participant. The timeline exists as a concept, a mental construct we use to organize experience, but the one who perceives it—the witness of past and future—is not bound to any point on that line. The present may be less like the mark we drew on our piece of paper and more like the light that allows us to see the paper at all. The present does not belong to time because it is the condition by which time is noticed. In this sense, the present is not something we pass through, it is what we are.

If we are not travelers moving through time, but the stillness through which time moves, then our true nature is not temporal, it is timeless. Think of time turning like pages in a book, from words unread to stories remembered. You are only in the book in words; the only space you occupy is in the story itself. Your actual self is behind the eyes that are reading it.