RUNNING OUT OF TIME

“What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled." Saint Augustine, Confessions

It’s been a bit more than sixteen-hundred years since Augustine confessed that he was baffled by time. And we’re still baffled by time, but we’ve decided to ignore that and treat time as a thing, a thing that actually exists. Some examples of what we perceive as time and its passage are simple.

A year is the name we’ve assigned to the approximate amount of time required for the earth to travel once around the sun—every four years we have to add one day to keep the months from sliding gradually out of alignment with their assigned seasons. A day is the name we’ve given to the time required for the earth to make a complete rotation on its axis, and we’ve divided that into things we call hours, minutes and seconds.

The phases of the moon, from new moon to full moon and back to new, have been used since antiquity as a measure of time’s passage. And the seasons, although less well defined than these others, provide a strong sense of time as past, present and future. It was spring, it is summer, and fall will arrive. A time to plant, a time to harvest, and a time to prepare for the next planting. These natural cycles represent a kind of time that is beyond our control. On their own, unbidden, untamed, they come and go, approach and pass us by. We can only observe them and adapt our behavior to their power. Time and tide wait for no man.

Although these natural cycles are doubtless the origin of our perception of the existence of time, the way we perceive them is quite different from the way we perceive what we might call our possessed time. Our relationship to possessed time is revealed by our language. We’re under the impression that time is not only a thing, but a thing that we can possess and control. We say that we can make time and take it, and that time is money. My father, an attorney, had on his desk a wooden plaque engraved with a saying attributed to A. Lincoln: “A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade.” We say that we use time and waste it, spend time wisely or foolishly, and spare it. We say that we’re making good time and having a bad time, and think that we can manage our time. We’re confident when time is on our side, but fearful when time is against us. We keep time, but only when we tap our foot to the beat of the music, and Jim Croce longed to keep time in a bottle. We give time and lose it, and time is something that we either have or don’t have enough of, although occasionally we have plenty of time or even more than enough time. We mark time and we measure it. And it’s in the measurement of time that things get odd, because we think we do that while residing in present time. When Augustine said: “if nothing were, there would be no present time,” he implied that the existence of what we perceive brings present time into existence. I think we have to invert that and propose that if there were no present time, nothing would be. Or, even more disturbing, if there is no present time, nothing is.

Augustine failed to acknowledge an important attribute of present time. The amount of time that has passed can be measured; we ate three hours ago. The amount of time until something comes to pass can be measured; we will eat in three hours. But when it comes to the present moment, which comprises present time and which is the only time in which we and everything else that we perceive to be real exist, the present time that makes up the present moment is dimensionless. The present moment can always be divided by two or four or ten, again and again, infinitely, until we reach the moment that is referred to as “at this point in time,” and we all learned that a point has no dimension. Present time is an oxymoron.

Using the arbitrarily defined units we’ve assigned to the concept, we measure the passage of time as beginning at this timeless present moment, recording the quantity of time that flows past us from the future into the past, like water in a hose flowing from tap to nozzle. But the middle of a hose has no dimension. It’s just the point at which one half of the hose ends and the other half begins. In the same way, the present moment has no dimension in terms of duration of time. It’s just the point at which the future ends and the past begins.

So, are we left with something that we call time, which exists in or as the past, and which exists in or as the future, but that doesn’t exist in the present? Do we exist in the present moment for only a non-existent period of present time, only occupying the point of transition between future and past? If so, apart from uncertainty about the duration of our existence, there are these other serious questions left for us to ponder.

If time doesn’t dwell in the present, doesn’t reside for any meaningful or measurable period, and if future, present and past are a continuum, how does time convert from future time into past time? Does future time jump over the present and into past time? If so, how much time is required for time to complete the leap? Does measurable future time transition into some non-lasting transient version of time—we might call it momentary time—and then transition into measurable past time? Does it make any sense at all to try to talk about an un-measurable period of time? Time as we conceive of it is by definition measurable. It is a measure of itself. An un-measurable thing called present time isn’t time at all. It’s just a placeholder between future time and past time. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure of what it isn’t. It isn’t time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what I termed possessed time is not a thing at all, being instead a mere human construct to help us survive, an artifice of language essential for meaningful communication. But I certainly can’t presume to deny the existence of time, because that would force me to deny the existence of energy, because E = mc², c stands for the speed of light, and speed is defined as distance travelled relative to amount of time spent travelling. No time, no energy. The only conclusion I’m left with is that there really is a thing called time, but only as it exists in the realm of theoretical physics, an essential constant in the arcane calculations that posit the existence of mass, of dark matter and dark energy. In that realm, things are considered real if they are necessary to balance the books on energy.

It’s time for me to let this go. If I had more time, maybe I could understand time. Thanks for sharing your valuable time with me. Perhaps we can spend some time thinking about time and get together to discuss it sometime in the future. Will that be worth our time? I don’t know. Only time will tell.