Time Out

Time.

Do you have it? What time is it? There is not enough time in a day. When you get the time...

All of these expressions are fairly commonplace in our everyday English language. We use it all the time, and there are similar expressions that convey the same concepts in other languages as well, such as “¿Qué hora es? ¿Cuánto tiempo lleva? Si tuviera más tiempo...,” etc. So we, as human beings, have a sense of time, but I would like to offer some critical reflections on what time actually is, what is says about us, what use it may have, and any other random reflections that come to mind.

First of all, I think it is important to understand that time does not exist. I think that time was a measure, a device, a concept that we human beings came up with to describe and understand the world in which we find ourselves. There is not some universal, objective clock that exists, ticking away the time since “the beginning,” however you would like to define that. There is not going to be a time when this clock can not go any further or breaks or starts over. Time is something that humans conveniently created in order to communicate with others in relation to themselves.

This is the next important part. When we talk about time, it is always in relation to ourselves. It does not matter what you are talking about, you are always going to have a starting point that relates to your current position in time/space. Just look at all of the different periods or intervals of time that we commonly talk about that relates to our current configuration. The seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) are all highly subjective to our current time and place. When it is summer in Minnesota and Ohio, it is winter in Argentina and Australia. When it is winter in Minnesota and Ohio, it is summer in Argentina and Australia. But you could say that there is some sort of continuity between places that are in the same hemisphere, for example when it is spring in Ohio, it is also spring in Bulgaria. So one could say that spring exists, it just is due to the configuration/tilt/position of the Earth within the solar system that determines seasonal differences on Earth. However, think about it this way: even within the same hemisphere spring comes at different times. I think this year is a perfect example. Spain and Minnesota/Iowa are in the same hemisphere, so technically it is the same season (spring), but there are still five feet of snow on the ground in Minnesota and nearing or below zero temperatures are common. Spain, on the other hand, has not seen snow since January and the current temperature (and the temperature that it has regularly reached since the beginning of March) is fifty degrees. I think this just goes to show how much time relates to and describes our current position than anything else.

(I am going to go on a lot of tangents here for a bit, but just take it all in and think about all of these different things I am going to say, despite the lack of a coherent argument.)

Years are relational to our current position. When you say yesterday, this means that you are talking about something before the current time, but that recently occurred. This is in contrast to the day before yesterday, which is farther in the past than yesterday. Last week comes before this, last month, last semester, last trimester, last quarter, last year, five years ago. It does not matter, all of these are in relation to the current here and now.

This whole matter gets even more complicated with the different ways in which humans measure time. I mentioned in the previous paragraph “yesterday” and “the day before yesterday.” But the problem arises in defining a day. How do you do it? In the West, we have divided a day into 24 hours, consisting of sixty minutes, and within those minutes we divide yet again into 60 seconds per minute. One could go further and deeper, getting much more specific (nanoseconds, milliseconds, etc.) but we can just stick to this basic division. Why are there 24 hours in a day? Who made this rule up? It seems pretty random, if you ask me. What about this whole 60 thing? Why do we not have 100 minutes in one hour and 100 seconds in a minute? Why 60? But then again, after thinking about it, why 100? What is so special about 100? (There is a historical explanation about Babylonians – or someone – using a mathematical system with a base of 60, so we adopted it, but then the question is why did they think in these terms?) Then there are differences in how we define when a day starts and when it ends. In the West, a day officially ends at 11:59:59pm, with the next second putting us in a new day, making 12:00:00am being a new day and this new day follows the same pattern, finishing its course at 11:59:59pm. If we do not like this idea and realize that these digital clocks are a very modern invention, we could go by the sun, saying that a day begins when the sun rises and the day ending when the sun sets. However, when does a sun officially rise and set? How do we know that it has risen? Does it bring a banner saying that the day has begun and wave goodbye at the end of the day? I do not think so. But this is just our own Western culture that measures times by the journey of the sun, as other traditions (such as Judaism) measure a day as beginning and ending by the moon, partially relying on the sun. A day in Judaism begins when the sun sets and ends when the sun rises, making it completely opposite that of Western civilization. How did they come up with this? Why do they follow this? (Again, there might be historical or cultural explanations, but I am not aware of them and am just asking rhetorically.) This gets even more complicated in the West with the creation of Daylight Savings Time. Why does it exist? How can we play with time like that? Doesn't it make sense that if we can "control" time like this, that there is no such thing as a universal, objective clock keeping track of time?

Related to this difference in how a day is measured is a further issue of how we measure years, as I noted in the paragraph before last that talking about something that happened five years ago is wholly in relation to the current year/time. Not the entire planet follows the same calendar, though, and so we measure the years differently. For us it is 2013 right now. For Jews it is the year 6,000 something. Muslims say it is only the year 1400 or so. But how can this be? Again, the answer is relational: we measure years in terms of important events. For Christians (we in the West), the year indicates how many years have passed since Jesus was crucified, for Jews it is since “the beginning of time,” and for Muslims it has been 1400 years since their Prophet Muhammad died. The bottom line between all of these is the fact that we measure years in terms of important events, making them relational to us and our culture rather than some objective clock on the wall that tells us what time it really is. This question of years and such has yet another interesting and mind-boggling manifestation. Think about when scientists talk about the years since the dinosaurs roamed, the time that has passed since humans as we know them today began to exist, how many years ago the Big Bang started the universe. The answer usually entails hundreds of thousands and hundreds of millions and tens of billions of years. It is almost inconceivable for someone to think about something so long ago. At least for me it is. Then the answer becomes how do we know this and how are we measuring this, which are two questions the answers to which I have no understanding/learning.

I discussed the difference between different cultures and how Jews measure time one one, Muslims another, and Christians yet another, so one might be willing to say that it is simply a matter of different cultures. This is the reason why we have different measures of time. However, even within the same culture we sometimes measure time differently. I mentioned “last month” in that list of references of time that always is in relation to us. The understanding of “last month” depends on which calendar you use to measure time. Within the Roman world (I believe) there existed a couple of different calendars. There was the Julian calendar and then the Gregorian calendar later. How can we change calendars and have different dates even within the same culture? If someone within the Julian calendar framework were to speak with someone of the Gregorian calendar and try to pick a date for a wedding (say July 16^th), one of them would be earlier than the other by about fifteen days (I think). So even within the same culture there are differences in how we measure time. This is further complicated by the number of days in a month. Some have 30, some have 31, one has 28. Why do we have these differences? Who decided that it would be important or helpful to have these differences? In the case of the month that only has 28, we decided that it would be cool every now and then (arbitrarily four years) to just add a day. I seriously think it is just for kicks and giggles, to make life more interesting, to confuse young children who are trying to learn the calendar. Honestly, ("scientific" explanations aside) it seems rather random and silly.

So I think that given all of these examples, it is fairly obvious that time is extremely subjective, that it does not really exist outside of humanity. There would be no sense of time without humans. Years would not exist, nor would days, hours seconds, months. I think this is astounding, but also might provide some advice or a different way of thinking. After being in Spain for nearly three months, maybe it is easy for me to say this, but I think that there are a lot of people that think about this in the States as well, and they have never been out of the country. I often hear or read about people reminding others to live in the present, because that is all we have. I think this is extremely valuable advice that many people ought to follow and seriously reflect upon, because we often think about where we have to be in two hours, where we were three months ago, where we would like to be in five years, but we forget about the seconds slipping past us right now. We forget that all we have immediate access to is right now. I recently watched a movie that discussed various philosophical themes and ideas and in one of them, a woman was talking about how right now, in this very instant, she is closer to death than she ever has before. We always think about what we are going to do in the future, how we will be able to do a lot more stuff, but in that future, you are even closer to death. I know this is a grim way of looking at how the world works and maybe it is something that just makes us fear that we are wasting the present even more. So we in turn get worried and start having lots of anxiety about that, but we need to simply realize this fact and then do something now, right here.

So go ahead, stop reading this, wasting what time you have, and get out there and do something before you are too close to death to really do anything.

P.S. Before you go (or if you already have, that is fine too - better, even), sorry for my excessive use of "quotation marks." I have included them because I am not entirely certain about a lot of the terms that I have used within them or I have included them because they are potentially controversial terms that I have provided my own opinions about, but that might offend someone else.