Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey
In high school, I took summer classes every year. One summer, I took creative writing. A week ago, I stumbled upon the journal I kept for that class. I don’t remember what the majority of prompts were, so that makes some of the entries really interesting. Here’s a line from one of them:
“When you tiptoe through the Valley of Happiness, you might find panda bears playing ‘Streetcorner Symphony’ on banjos."
Imagine being the teacher reading a series of 25 sentences
like this one, multiplied by however many of us were taking that class at the
time. Not all
of the things I wrote were that strange, though. My first entry was a reflection on the
concept of time. Time is something I
find entertaining to think about. It’s
both concrete and abstract. There are
the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun, but also clocks and
calendars. Before I dive into it all
right here and now (coffee brain is starting up), I want to insert an excerpt
of what I found in my journal.
Time is such a quirky thing. Who declared the length of a second or a
minute? Why can one moment seem to last
longer than a different one of the same length?
Something that happened years ago can feel like it happened
yesterday. Conversely, one can feel like
an event from the day before had occurred months ago.
Take school for example. It just ended two days ago, but I feel as if
it’s half-way through summer already. On
the other hand, my brother who just completed his freshman year told me, “It
feels like I graduated 8th grade weeks ago.”
With this type of confusion, how
can we ever grasp the concept of time?
We sense it, but it is so abstract.
Even though we have quantified it in our imperfect human way (we have
leap years to attempt to make up for that), we still get lost in moments. We try to count the falling grains of the
sands of time.”
Yeah, I know, cliff-hanger
ending. I didn’t seem to care to finish
off my thought after I reached the bottom of the page. Now, I’d complete it saying “We try to count
the falling grains of the sands of time, but they move too fast and slip
between our fingers. We hold onto some
moments, but others fall out of our grasp.
Returning to the abyss of the unknown from which they came.” We use time as a way to organize our lives,
celebrate the past, and draw connections between events.
We keep track of these things with
calendars which try to reign time’s natural force and apply order to it. From watching the seasons change, the Julian
calendar draws its concept of a year.
From watching a sun rise and set, we have defined “day.” Other cultures focused on the cycles of the
moon to create a lunar calendar. Then,
using these concepts, records could be kept that no longer drew upon who was in
power during a period of time. The
concrete sense of time became less human-dependent in one sense while
humanizing it in another.
And, we have taken it further than
that. We created the abstract ideas of
hours, minutes, and seconds. Yes, they
have a sense of quantity. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds
in a minute. But what actually is a
second? Who decided this was to be the
structure that the world has come to operate under? Why is a minute defined as 60 seconds? Did someone just like the number 60? And why are hours centered on a different
number? Was there some sort of geometry
involved with a sundial on a specific day to decide these things? Also, who was the one that decided to make
midnight be 12 am and noon 12pm?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to use 0 instead of 12?
Ok, you get the point. Time is one of those concepts that, to a
degree, fascinates me. And I haven’t
even really dug into my thoughts on past, present, and future (maybe another
time). Life and how humans try to make
sense of everything is just neat. And I
know if I dug into things a little more, like the history behind clocks and different
ancient cultural takes on everything, this feeling would only intensify with new
questions and wonder the answers they give.
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