Time

            Time is a funny thing. It’s something we rely on so much, yet it never seems to be consistent. Sometimes it flies by, while other times it drags on and on. A year will fly by or feel like forever. Is it so surprising that time grabs the interest of so many people?

            My opinion is that time doesn't really exist. It is merely a term humans have invented to satisfy our need to measure and quantify everything. But not everything can be measured, at least not with any means we currently have. I’ll admit that something resembling time must exist, but it is far too abstract and strange for us to understand with our current knowledge and abilities.

            I recently saw a video on YouTube that explained that, while we claim to live in the present, we actually experience things in the past – a moment after they occur. This is caused by the time it takes our senses to transmit their information to our brains. It isn't very much time, but it isn't instantaneous either, which is enough to make a difference. That’s how we sometimes know what’s going to happen a moment before it does. It also explains déjà vu; sometimes the order in which we perceive things gets mixed up, so part of our brain thinks something already happened – which, technically, it did. Or, of course, it could always be a change in the program of the Matrix.

            A common way of describing time is as the fourth dimension. This does make a lot of sense, especially if you watch a video I found years ago called Imagining the Tenth Dimension. It explains how all of existence (and possible existence), at least to our current level of understanding, can be said to exist within ten dimensions. The video describes this extremely well, using dots, lines, branches and folds, then repeating. I’d explain it to you myself, but the video does it better. It also touches very lightly on hypothetical time travel.

            Ahh, time travel. It has been dreamed about for centuries! What if we could go back and change something, or go forwards to see the future? The dreamers have popped up with dozens of theories about the possibilities of how timelines work. Is there just one timeline, where if someone changed the past, they already did it in the present so it can’t really change anything? Or are there multiple dimensions, born from the decisions people make, where every time something is changed millions of new dimensions are created? Perhaps everything that is, has or will ever happen is happening all at once, or time is like a vast sea we are weaving our way through, constantly doubling back but never crossing over. Then there’s the theory that with every moment that passes, the universe is destroyed and remade.

            Maybe time just doesn't exist, or is an entity too complex for us to comprehend.

            Time is a funny thing. It’s something we rely on so much, yet it never seems to be consistent. A year ago (minus two days) I got married and the year almost felt like a year. Almost, but it was still on the short side. Where does the time go when it’s not around here?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.