When a student is present, does that automatically mean they exist? I often find myself puzzled by English: one word is presence, another is existence. If “ada” and “hadir” in Indonesian both imply being there, why does English distinguish them? Perhaps because presence marks something visible or detectable, while existence points to something that continues to be, even when it is unseen or unperceived. The distinction feels subtle, yet it shapes how we think about being itself.
A similar confusion appears when I reflect on has been and will be. These terms indicate different temporal zones—one in the past, the other in the future—yet both refer to states that are not happening right now. If existence can only be anchored in the present moment, then whatever once existed and whatever will exist seem to share the same fate: both are, in a sense, “not here” at this moment. But is that really the case? Or does existence in fact transcend the divisions of time, while we are the ones restricting it with grammatical categories, tenses, and linguistic rules?
It is unfortunate, then, that the best language humanity possesses is actually mathematics, while natural languages only serve to confuse us further. At least that is my layperson’s view, grounded in a single simple tautology: a equals a. But Pak Anwar, who is brilliant at calculus, would probably object. He would insist that even in mathematics, unsolved problems continue to haunt us. Very well—if that is so, then perhaps it is true after all that a does not always equal a, depending on the context in which it is examined.
As I walk back and forth between the cafeteria and the classroom, I feel as though I am moving through space, and that space is in fact space-time. I, a jet plane, and a telecommunications signal are all traversing the same fabric of space-time, each at a different velocity and with a different intensity of presence. I often imagine that everything fundamentally exists only in the present—yet this present is relatively compressed for every subject within it. A signal is faster than a jet, a jet faster than me, I faster than an ant, an ant more agile than a snail, and beyond all that, our Rector is probably already on another international flight. Meanwhile, Pak Anwar remains fixed in his calculus classroom, staring at a decimal number he just wrote on the board, suddenly realizing that behind the infinite expansion of real numbers, space and time themselves seem to contain some strange kind of fracture or separation.
Consider this: when the Rector’s plane lands in Germany, he might suddenly remember our campus in Serang, Banten. Meanwhile, in the same sweltering classroom as always, Pak Anwar might be contemplating the thoughts of German mathematicians. Or perhaps—at the very same moment, yet in completely different time zones—the Rector calls him: “How’s the campus? Everything alright?” And Pak Anwar replies, “What season is it in Berlin, Sir?” What kind of temporal situation is this? Different spaces, different clocks, and yet it feels as though they share one moment. This is why I think that what actually enables our existence is not merely time, but space-time itself—time as a spatial field that allows beings to co-exist. Let us call this a small fragment of a theory of simultaneity.
This theory, if pondered carefully, makes us aware that tenses were not invented to confuse us but to cultivate sensitivity: does the past still exist in the same way the present exists? The past can be said to “exist” only if its social formations continue to shape our present reality. What I truly feel—perhaps you do too—is not the past itself, but a present that is continually being pulled toward the future. And who is doing the pulling? I suspect it is a wide constellation of multinational forces. Once we were encouraged to “Save your money,” but now the mantra has shifted to “Invest your money.” School, university—everything is expensive, yet this is justified as an investment. Everything points to the future, so relentlessly that we end up forgetting time altogether. []
