Time

Time

{Writer’s note – an apology, because of the nature of English and the common ways of phrasing things, there will be a number of apparent puns about time in the following piece. None of these are intentional unless specified; they are just a happy accident of English}

Time is one of those things that seem to be the cause of a lot of people’s anger; they have too much, that must wait for too much of it, it seems to go on forever (pun intended), or conversely it runs away from them or runs out, runs short, or there is just none left at all. Movies play with its passage and it is the subject of many television shows, books and musings. Though after all that, it is largely misunderstood.

The thing about it is – we all have the same amount, or at least that is what the powers that be would have us believe. It seems to stretch out and contract entirely of its own will. As a child I remember that the hours, days and weeks stretched out before me as thought to eternity – or at least as far as the next term break.

And yet, as an adult, I find there are times that time disappears from me entirely and I find myself working absurdly late nights for reasons that escape me – not unlike the time before it.

This misperception of time is due largely to busyness with which we fill our lives. We have become, as it has been said, time poor. This is mostly down to electricity. Before we had easily accessible light facilities and entertainments that could keep us up and “interested”, or rather awake for hours on end, we were, largely, reliant on the sun to give us or daily portions. This gave us less time in which to be so busy and the nature of the work we were required to do before electricity became normal made us tired and being unable to complete more than a full day’s work, we rested for the evening content with our work.

But now we are so very busy and driven in what we must cram into a day that instead of a roughly 12-hour day, it has become far more common to start our days before dawn and return to our beds well after dusk, and so we have lost what a standard day means. This is not helped by the corporations that shorten our year as much as possible by starting Christmas sales in early November rather than the previous standard of only a few weeks before Christmas.

This disproportionate collapsing and expanding of how we view time has greatly altered our view of it. Combined with the media available on the subject I had thought that conversations on the subject would come easily and freely to many. But alas, this has not been my experience, especially on the finer points of the subject. Bring up, for example, the subject of eternity amongst most people and they will look at you blankly; ask them if life is predetermined or if free will exists they look at you quite quizzically. The fact of it is that in the last question the answer is simply that it depends on your point of view – something I thought most people had the ability to change; though when it comes to time they seem locked into a single point of view – of that being inside the current time stream.  Perhaps, as an exercise, you, dear reader, should try to remove yourself, or at least your point of view from the current time line and view the entire stream as though from a helicopter.

People often mistake time for an unchangeable constant that has only the appearance of speeding up and slowing down, so I will leave you with this small titbit. Time itself is changeable – and this is not only a theoretical thought experiment – time has been proven to be changed by physicists in an extremely simple experiment by taking three atomic clocks, leaving one standing still, and taking the other 2 on flights round the world – one east and one west. I will leave you, dear reader, to further seek any answers you may wish to find, but suffice to say that the answer is not what you think. But keep in mind – if you wish to live longer than others, live faster and higher – both have an effect on time.

So thank you for spending some of your time to read what took me some time to write about time, and next time I’ll try and be a little briefer between writings so that I might take, if you will allow it, some more of your time…