What is Time?
Many of us experience time as something that flows past us. Time passes, but we all know it flows faster when we’re having fun! So, it flows differently at different times. Like water, perhaps time flows faster on the outside of bends, eroding our edges of experience and making a convoluted tapestry of life until an oxbow forms like an important memory of a past self locked up like a lake forever.
But some things are just longer than others, too, regardless of how we experience them. Things endure for specific periods of time. In this sense, time is not a free-flowing river but a dammed reservoir. Time is contained in a thing for a period, but nothing lasts forever.
We also measure time. If you Google “image of time,” all you find are images of clocks. The words “year” and “harvest” were once synonyms. Science cannot exist without time-axis graphs—years, hours, minutes, and seconds. In this sense, time is a socially constructed collective reality, what the Greeks called chronos. And yet the Greeks distinguished between chronos and kairos, or moments in life not to be missed, testing times, fruitful times, birth, death, and moments of transition that marked out a lifetime against the unifying monotony of chronos. While chronos made its way into Latin, into English, and into the modern world, kairos was left to the dustbins of Greek ruins.
But what kairos points out is that time is change. Something happens to our sense of time when nothing is changing. Something also happens to our sense of time when everything is changing. There is something about the way that life takes note of time only in flux. Unchanging things, like white tees, blue jeans, and gravity, are timeless.
We perceive and experience time; it permeates our soul; it is the foundation of memory; it is the foundation of change; it is why we measure; and for Heidegger, it was literally everything. When we think about it as “out there,” we think of time as a series of events or moments, with one preceding the other. I tell you 9/11 happened before Obama was elected; you believe me. Is there a chance I’m wrong? Is there a chance that Obama was elected before 9/11? Maybe the Russians have their own little “Russian reality,” but alas, we all feel certain Obama was after 9/11. In this sense, time has two irreversible states: before and after (B).
And yet, in the sense we all mostly experience it, time has three states: past, present, and future (A). In this sense, both the past and future are unstable categories of reality, while the present is not. The present is the only thing that really exists. All societies have these two senses that McTaggart called A- and B-time.
My only real tattoo is of time. It is a calendrical wheel. I got it when I was studying agriculture in Wisconsin. It points back to a period when people mostly sensed the world as cyclical rather than linear. As we’ve collapsed into ourselves in this modern world, our own journeys from birth to death have become a constraining metaphor for all of reality. Religions coevolve out of tthis linearity. We become obsessed with the end of things. Time is something to be wasted, lost, or spent. Time is limited. We serve time for misbehavior. The end is near.
And yet, the sun also rises.