No Absolute Time

It's August, already? That's what I thought the other day when I saw that it was time for preseason football again. As much as I love football, it seemed, at least to me that for some reason, this year, the new season had come a little sooner than expected. 

Of course the reason could be that I had been so busy with various things that I hadn't noticed the passage of time. Days had seemingly whizzed by. Remember when we were kids and days seemed like weeks, weeks seemed like months, and months seemed like years? 

It makes me think back to what Einstein said about time. He said that it was an illusion. He said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”  It would appear that our perception of time is what it all comes down to.

As we get older, the time we spend having a particular experience can become shorter, as a result, the amount of detail that that goes into our stored memories becomes less and less. Because of the lack of greater detail, we get a sense that time is passing faster. The more information that we receive from our experiences the longer our days seem to be and slower our days appear to pass.

What I find most interesting about what I mentioned above is that Einstein also said that the past, present, and future are three stubbornly persistent illusions. He went on to say that space and time are essentially one and the same. For that reason, he believed that the past, present, and future all exist at once, without separation. 

Such a notion can be a bit confusing. I tend to sort it all out by thinking of the past as what we remember and the future as what we anticipate. To put it in another way, the present is the future becoming the past. This is just my opinion, but as humans, even though no two of us can have the same exact experience, we all perceive the world in the same way. The color red is the same to all of us regardless of what language we speak.

It just may be true that we are all suffering from temporal distortion. And, we are not yet able to get beyond a comfort zone where what we know, think, and feel about the passage of time allows us to live above a certain level of frustration that would certainly exist if we thought about such things too long or too hard.

But, maybe that’s just what we need. More time thinking, as we are living.