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Time is nothing other than the measurement of change. — Aristotle

I wasn't thinking about Aristotle when it happened. I was hypomanic, writing at a pace I couldn't have sustained and didn't want to stop. What I noticed — and I use that word carefully, because it wasn't a thought, it was more like a change in the quality of the air — was that everything happening around me was perfectly timed. The car that passed. The bird that landed on a delicate branch. The basketball conversation in the next room. The trash skittering across the road. The “Potential Spam” call. Nothing was early or late. Every element was arriving exactly when it was supposed to, in relation to everything else, and the whole of it was moving like music. Like a symphony that had always been playing and I had briefly been able to hear it. I was of it.

I knew I was probably hypomanic. It felt like enlightenment. I wasn't that removed.

Carlo Rovelli is a physicist who arrives at a nearby place from a very different direction. His work in relational quantum mechanics suggests that the properties of things are not absolute but arise in relation to other things. A particle does not simply have a position; it has a position relative to something else. What something is cannot be fully specified without reference to what it interacts with.

He makes a similar move with time. At the most fundamental level described by current physics, time does not appear as a single universal flow. What shows up instead are events and the relations between them. The sense of a shared flowing now may be something that emerges at larger scales rather than something built into the base layer of reality.

The symphony I heard did not feel like it was moving through time. It felt like a pattern of relations — everything arriving in coherence with everything else. It felt like the structure of reality became briefly visible.

The question Rovelli doesn't answer — and is careful not to answer — is what relation is made of.

Nagarjuna was a second century Buddhist philosopher who arrived at a strikingly similar structure without any physics at all. His method was logic. He took every candidate for independent existence and dismantled it from the inside. Not by asserting that things are empty, but by showing that nothing can be found that exists on its own. Everything arises in dependence on everything else. He called this śūnyatā — emptiness — but he was precise about what he meant. Empty doesn't mean nothing. It means nothing stands alone.

He also said this: emptiness itself is empty. There is no final ground underneath appearances. The interdependence does not resolve into something more fundamental that stands apart from it.

Which means the symphony has no floor. It is not resting on anything separate from itself. It holds together through the fact of its relations. Every element sustaining every other element. The trash and the bird and the conversation in the next room and the self briefly hearing all of it — none of it self-subsisting, all of it mutually arising.

Rovelli found this in Nagarjuna and recognized a resonance. The meeting across eighteen centuries felt, he wrote, like finding a friend.

What neither of them names is what the arising is made of.

This is where I part ways with both of them. Not in their conclusions but in where they stop.

If nothing exists independently, if reality is relation all the way down, the question that remains is what relation is made of. Rovelli leaves it open. Nagarjuna would say the question itself is another thing to dismantle. But I keep returning to what I heard in that symphony — not just pattern, not just structure, not just the elegant interlocking of events. Something that felt like it was not indifferent.

This may be where a physicist stops reading.

But consider: if the self is not a fixed substance but an event arising in relation to other events, and Love is not a fixed substance either but what the arising is made of — then the border between self and Love is not what we think it is. Not something the self reaches toward. Already in the relations, as them. Each element arriving in coherence with every other — the trash, the bird, the self briefly hearing all of it — reflecting the whole to itself.

The symphony wasn't playing for me. But I was not separate from it either. There was no position outside the music from which to hear it. I was in it the way the trash and the bird were in it. An event among events. Mutually arising. Inside what was not indifferent to any of it.

Which is another way of saying: I appear to fall into and out of love. But I am never not it.

I am trying to put words to the unknowable. The great mystery will always be mysterious. Rovelli stops at the physics. Nagarjuna stops at the logic. I stop at the edge of what my language can carry.

I am aware the symphony is harder to hear when the elements are not a bird and a spam call. When they are a child. A bomb. A body. I don't have a framework that holds all of it. I only have what got through.

Ram Dass might have said: don't love your way around it. Love your way through it.

That time in my life — even though I was hypomanic, or maybe manic — forever changed the way I experience my self experiencing. The symphony is not always audible. But I cannot unhear it. Something about the nature of what is happening — all of it, always, in relation — got through. And whatever got through did not leave when the episode did.

The trash still skitters across the road. The bird still lands. The conversation still moves through the next room. The calls keep coming. I don't always hear the music. But I know it's playing.