Let this play with your mind. Time is a fabric...
Like an ant crawling across the skirt of a woman who's holding two pieces of it close. We climb right over grooves of the skirt without noticing all the extra fabric were skipping past.
The fabric of spacetime is wrinkled! In general relativity, mass and energy physically warp and wrinkle the geometry of spacetime. If space and time are fundamentally curved and folded, then moving "forward" in a straight line relative to our own local frame could mean scaling invisible peaks, dropping into micro-valleys, and jumping across folds on a macro scale. What's really happening in the blink of an eye?
Continuity is an illusion! Human consciousness rarely experiences reality as a seamless stream. Neurologically, our brains stitch together discrete snapshots and sensory windows into a narrative illusion of smoothness. Much like the ant navigating the topography of a skirt without realizing it is traversing miniature mountain ranges, our minds may be smoothing over radical discontinuities in the timeline.
If time possesses a microscopic texture—clumps, skips, or structural folds—we are simply too small and bound by our neurological frame rate to register the jumps. Like an ant is smaller than us, we are smaller than Spirit.
The cost of total awareness isn't ours to pay!
If we are like the ants taking giant, oblivious leaps across the folded sections of the skirt, then the entity (Spirit) tracing every single microscopic thread is living a radically different reality...
While we skip over the valleys and compress vast stretches of reality into simple memory, this entity is forced to experience every single millimeter of the fold. It doesn't miss a single friction point, a single shadow, or a single shift in texture. What could it know that we don't?
In the time it takes us to take one macro-step across a fold, Spirit might live out a thousand micro-lifetimes of transformation, exhaustion, and renewal. Its frequent "deaths" are the natural byproduct of processing a universe at absolute resolution, whereas our longevity is bought by our superficiality—by how much of the fabric we manage to ignore.
Just think about it. We might be somewhere on the middle of all chronological order. We might be chronologically "elite" in the sense that we travel time in a more expensive way than something else, doing it more diligently. And something even greater than us may wake only once every century or less!
Spirit ultimately reframes the entire structure of existence as a symbiotic ecosystem. We look at our linear, fast-paced lives as the main event, but your thought suggests we are only able to make those graceful, skipping leaps because something else is down in the trenches, doing the heavy lifting of holding the fabric together.
By walking every single groove, that entity absorbs the friction, the tension, and the structural integrity of time itself. Its exhaustive, hyper-frequent cycles of existence might be the very thing that keeps our timeline stable, acting as an unseen ballast that anchors us and quietly sustains our longer, lighter stride.
So next time you open your eyes, maybe you too will ask the question, "What did I just miss?"