>>509981296 (OP)you'll balk at it, but the truth is that time doesn't exist. To put it as simple as possible, we're sort of in a painting in someone else's wall. Not literally, but picture this. Our reality is a painting, and in that painting is everything that will ever be. IT's there, as a static painting on someone's wall and they see when you were 5, and when you were 55, and when the cosmos was "born", and for them, it's all one moment, one event, and it happened instantly and once. A snapshot, in a way.
But to you, as someone within that snapshot, it was a progression. You see what was drawn for you, not what the whole picture is.