Context: The Beirut Explosion

4 August 2020. On this seemingly average day, the Lebanese people's existence was rocked by a life altering explosion. A large amount of Ammonium Nitrate, stored at the port of the city of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, Detonated. This resulting in at least 181 devastating deaths, 6,000 injuries and an odious $10-15 Billion (US) in property damage. A catastrophic estimate of 300,000 people were rendered homeless.

Such an event couldn't have been anticipated by the ordinary person going about their day to day. The businesses that people had spent their whole lives building and the sentimental objects they treasured vanished in an instant. A question began to loom in my mind -

What do we consider to hold value in our lives? Inanimate objects, businesses, relationships and people. What should we consider superficial? Within the blink of an eye your home, car, favourite jacket can disappear. Gone.

Whilst contemplating on the project (Present, Past and Future), I began seeing articles discussing the different events occuring during the exact moment of the detonation.

This lead me to consider the flow of time that connects the 3 phases of time known to humans: the past, present and the future.

In one instance, a mother brought a child into the world and elsewhere a bride took photos hopeful for her future together with her to be husband.

2 events are mutually inclusive when they can both occur simultaneously.

These events show this type of relationship in terms of life and death.

There's the obvious connection between death and the explosion, which stops someones life in the present, but what about the future after the explosion? Will there be new growth like after a forest fire or will they be succeeded by rapid decline in a country already crumbling under a prolonged financial crisis and soaring inflation? In the past, there's the storing of the ammonium nitrate and the financial crisis to explore.

I pose on other, final question as I contemplate on the intangible nature of time:

Can the Future influence the Past?

We'd have to look to Quantum Mechanics for such an answer...

Einstein once wrote, in a letter to comfort the widow of a recently deceased friend, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”