Temporal overlay: when past knowledge and new understanding overlap at the moment of observation

 Just a few days before the formal submission of the thesis, as I was writing to a friend I was struck by a disconcerting sensation of temporal overlay. There aren't words to reference the experience so I'm making them up to describe the sensation. At one and the same time, I experienced the sensation of perceiving two snapshots in time overlaying each other: one from the past and one which would represent the future. These words feel clumsy as I struggle describe so let me use an example from that moment in time. 

On one level there's nothing new in what I have contributed in my thesis, from the practical perspective of the actions taken. On another, it is my perceptions of those actions which has completely been transformed. This really is what I learnt: how to push at my perception and my understanding to expand and deepen it as a means to rise above it all completely and see it anew. The narrative I use to describe my work changed, not the work itself. Hence the temporal dissonance when I sat there reading a paragraph describing the practical actions taken in the field. 

The temporal snapshot from the previous 20 years conveyed a familiar and well-known activity. Yet at the same time it was overlaid by the sensation of being able to see it in a wholly novel way. It is not that the old version of understanding has been completely replaced by the current version of understanding thus replacing and erasing from view the temporal snapshot from the past. Instead it felt as though my vision itself had changed (and, not my focal length either). Instead where I saw things in monochrome I was now seeing colour. 

I'll be honest, I don't think I had any idea of what I was getting into even as I knew I didn't have an idea of what lay ahead of me when I began the PhD back in 2019 (yes, its been a very long time and it wasn't meant to be so: the pandemic probably tacked on an extra couple of years for sure).