Time in Perspective
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As summer edges towards fall, I became aware of the movement of time. The falling temperatures, the coming of rain, the cool breezes, the familiar scents and events; they are comforting.
I am fascinated by time because it is a marvelous window into our worldview and because it is so mysterious. The prevalent belief in the West is that time is linear. But, there are cultures that view time as cyclical – repeating itself over and over again – and those that see time as a creation of our minds – it doesn’t really exist. Isn’t it funny that with something as fundamental as time, at least three completely different views coexist? Even scientists – the arbiters of truth in the modern age – are at pains to describe what time is.
I think of time as I watch with amazement my a newborn interacting with their surroundings. Because I have no recollection of my own experience as an infant, I imagine that because a newborn has no history and only a nascent ability to form memories, their experience of time is simply an experience of the moment. I can almost feel how powerful the experience must be, having no past and no anticipated future to draw on; no filters, expectations, and prejudices to simplify stimuli into convenient categories.
Even once we’ve learned to make sense of time, our experience of it warps contextually. We have atomic clocks so precise they can tell us how many nanoseconds younger we would be than the rest of humanity if we flew to Mars and back at 1/10 the speed of light. And yet, in our own experience the span between 2:55 and the school bell at 3:00 can take four hours, while a two-minute rollercoaster ride lasts five seconds. The time between our 7th and 10th birthday can be decades long while the interval between age 50 and 80 can seem like a year or two at most. Or, in relation to massage therapy, a day with neck pain can seem like a month while a one hour massage can feel like its over all too soon.
This could be seen as a sobering reality, but then again it shows that time is a matter of perspective. It could also be wondrous, like watching with awe as a breeze dislodges an autumn maple leaf, spinning it to the ground, slowly, slowly.
