Time

inspired by Men Who Stand Like Gods

There was a time—though it’s hard to even call it “time”—when there was nothing. No stars, no space, no planets, not even a hint of what might come. It wasn’t an empty void, because voids imply emptiness, and emptiness suggests space. But there was no space at all. Just… nothing.

Then, out of that nothing, something changed. It wasn’t a sound or a flash of light. Those things didn’t exist yet. It was more like an idea, the potential for something to happen, even before things could happen. A tiny flicker of possibility, hanging there, just waiting.

And then it grew. Slowly at first, barely noticeable, but undeniably real. A point appeared—a tiny, infinite point. It wasn’t a dot, because a dot takes up space, but this wasn’t a dot. It was a seed, a tiny seed of everything. And as it grew, it didn’t expand into empty space because there was no space yet—it expanded into *space* itself. Everything, all at once, stretched into being. Time and space, galaxies, stars, planets—each one unfolding as if they were waiting for the moment they could exist.

Time didn’t begin like a clock ticking; there was no clock. It didn’t start with a loud bang either. It was more like a slow stretch, like something coming into being that had never been before. Time was part of the unfolding, but it wasn’t something you could measure or observe from the outside—it was the very act of everything happening. Everything was happening *in* time.

And as the universe stretched and began to form, things got complicated. Stars were born, burned out, and gave way to new stars. Galaxies collided, and planets took shape. On one of those planets, life began to bloom. Creatures evolved, and they looked up at the stars and asked the big questions. “How did this all begin? Where did all of this come from? What happened before the beginning?”

But as they searched for answers, something odd happened. The more they looked, the more they realized the beginning wasn’t a single moment in time. It wasn’t one point where everything started. It wasn’t something that could be neatly pinned down. The beginning was the process itself—something that kept unfolding, that couldn’t be separated from everything that happened afterward. Time and space weren’t separate things that could be looked at from the outside. They were inside everything, wrapped up in it all.

The more they asked, the more they understood: the beginning wasn’t just a moment in history. It was still happening. The universe wasn’t finished, and time wasn’t done. The story was still unfolding.

And maybe, just maybe, that was the point all along: the beginning never really ended. It was part of the universe’s way of existing, constantly moving forward.

The beginning, it turned out, wasn’t a place or a time. It was everything

And they were living right in the middle of it.