what is time, really?
do you want more time to think?
ah, but therein lies the fallacy. is time a resource - something you can have? most human languages treat time as a finite resource, something you either possess or lack.
when’s the last time you rejected a friend’s invite to hang out?
“i don’t have time, sorry!”
what you were really trying to say is:
“at the moment in space-time you have indicated an interest in enjoying my company, as indicated by the date and time on the Gregorian calendar, i have decided that my being will be at the same point in time but not that of space. Therefore, unless it is possible for you to traverse either the space or time axes to find me, I will be occupied. have a pleasant rest of your day, where a day is the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun…”
right now you are aware of the passage of time; you know it has moved forward ever since you began reading this blog post. but what evidence do you have that any time passed?
i’ve always been fascinated with time. i think one of the most unique aspects of being human is that we each get to develop our own personal relationship with time over the course of our lives. and what a wonder! time should be standardized, and it is, to some extent, but you know the feeling of time dragging as you wait for school to end or time flying when you’re consumed by something you love. perception is what matters, not the reading on the clock.
maybe you could tell that time has passed because the reading on the clock has changed. well, then i’d have to remind you that the second, the minute, the hour, and every unit of time as we know it are all man-made constructs. by relying on the clock, you become part of the machine. you assume time will continue ticking on in a fixed linear motion forward when it takes little, so little, to throw our entire world off balance.
it takes 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach us. so if the sun ever went out, well…
it takes up to 24 hours for google calendar to sync.
it takes 4 years for a leap year to occur. leap years are necessary to offset the 6 hours of difference between the calendar year and the astronomical year, otherwise our calendars would fall out of sync with the seasons.
but all of these are just arbitrary numbers, aren’t they? humans didn’t invent time; we just learned to observe. so why are we treating time like a commodity? why do we use the same crude terms to refer to time as the bad grade we got on a test, or the clothes we bought off a website that relies on child labor to manufacture its goods?
or maybe humans are gods, and we’ve always had control over time. take a look at this equation:
it’s a miracle, isn’t it? we can solve for t, time, the ubiquitous facet of life, the one thing that everyone has in common, with just a simple kinematics equation. we can predict just about anything that involves time, from when the sun will set and rise to when the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. given that we have such a perfect, intuitive grasp of time, maybe we’re entitled to think of time as our resource to do whatever we want with, to spend wisely or waste. as long as we acknowledge that it’s finite—after all, what does anyone truly yearn for in the end but just a little more time?
so try not to get mad the next time your mom says she’s “waited for half a day” for you to get ready（等了半天了）, or the cashier with a slight ominous expression says “enjoy your next 24 hours” instead of “have a nice day.” maybe you don’t see perfectly eye-to-eye on time—and that’s perfectly fine.