You Are The Past, Present and Future

Have you ever thought "everything is connected"? Then your past, present and future can’t be separate.

This week I visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Tucked into the museum store, nearly hidden, was one last leftover t-shirt from a past Jenny Holzer exhibit. It read:

“You are the past, present, and future.”

Holzer is known for using bold, declarative text in unexpected places—LED signs, stone benches, billboards. Her art makes you stop and confront ideas that you normally rush past: truth, war, power, love, and the self. She doesn’t soften her messages. She laser-etches them into your awareness.

That shirt grabbed my attention, because lately I’ve been pondering the future and its potential impact on the present: The Future Already Knows and The Future Already Knows, Part 2.

I am the past. That part of me that was crushed in fifth grade by a 160-pound bully? Still in me. The loss of one parent, then another? Still resonating forward in time.

I am the present, still trying to pay attention, to stop my mind from wandering, and to understand just how incredibly narrow the present moment must be: the instant I become aware of it, that moment vanishes into the past.

Until recently, I always imagined that the future was over the horizon somewhere. But what if that’s not true? What if it already exists?

I like to ponder the idea that each of us is everything we ever were or ever will be… that baby you and adult you and elderly you exist simultaneously, in one connected ripple.

To put this another way, if everything is connected, then how can it be any other way?

If everything is connected, then your past, present and future can’t be separate.

That’s not just philosophy. It’s physics.

In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time doesn’t tick forward like a universal metronome. Instead, it’s woven into a fabric of spacetime that bends and stretches depending on speed and gravity. One implication of this? The past, present, and future may all exist at once. We just experience them sequentially.

Physicists call this the “block universe” model. Imagine the entire timeline of your life already mapped out, like a filmstrip. You, right now, are one frame of it. But all the other frames still exist… and have always existed.

So when Jenny Holzer wrote “You are the past, present, and future,” maybe she wasn’t just provoking thought. Maybe she was tuning into a deeper truth.

If your future already exists, maybe that’s why you sometimes sense a pull. A decision that feels more like remembering than choosing. A strange moment of clarity, as though part of you already knows.

Because maybe it does.

This changes things.

Perhaps the question isn’t: how will you become who you're meant to be?

Maybe it’s: are you ready to receive the signal from who you already are?

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