About time and the human condition (Essay)

There comes a time in every human being’s life when we recognize that time is faster than us. Maybe at age three, a day was enough to spend eternity, but when there are too many years in one’s back and decades pass like photograms in an old movie, years and years could go by and barely feel like the blink of an eye. Why does this happen? Is it our instincts holding on to our youth? Or maybe a remaining of that old fear to death that we have inherited from our ancestors?

There is not a single wild animal with a strong concept of time, to have one is quite ridiculous if you think about it, a cartoon of the human need to have everything under control. But time does not care at all, it is chaotic and meaningless whatsoever. Albert Einstein had nearly decipher it when he drew the relativity theory and painted time not like a hand on a clock, but like a tidal wave covering the entirety of everything, a tidal wave so cathartic and wild that gives us no choice but to be dragged to the end begging for it to have mercy with us.

According to Einstein, when one moves, the tidal wave is manipulated, if the movement is slow, the tidal wave would barely be deformed, but if the movement is fast, faster than any human has gone before, you will transform that aggressive tidal wave into a meek pond , a pond where you will be able to slide on, as softly as water on silk. It is possible that some brave man will try it in the future, meanwhile, it is up to us to dream and imagine that the tidal wave might have a deeper purpose, not as random and spine-chilling like the one that has been shown to us.

I was nine years old when I understood what time was about, my mother had just put together a modest party for me, a few guest were eating chocolate and drinking juice or whatever adults were supposed to drink back then, a song which had topped the charts was sounding on the radio and when it was over, the interlocutor spoke some words as true as well as trite: “Enjoy today, as it will never happen again”, I, being the clever and sarcastic boy I used to be, said in a high pitch: “yeah, of course, as if I’ll never turn years again”, my mother turned to me and with a sweet kind of irritated voice, she said: “you will never turn nine again”. I had many birthdays after that , in some I cried, in some I laughed, in some I got drunk on life and love, but just as my mother had predicted, I never found myself back in that home party eating chocolate and drinking juice, I think about that moment a lot.

But time is not only a faceless villain that snatches what we love the most, it is benevolent as well, and kind sometimes. When we, as human beings, find ourselves in a trench overflowing with bad thoughts and demons under the bed, time comes accompanied by its intimate friend, oblivion, that, slow and steady fills our veins with a sedative that compels us to be better, and the moment we least expect, we find ourselves smiling again.

We have already analyzed time from our perspective, as if it were a living being walking with us through every moment in our lives, but what would time be for an impartial observer? Somebody who does not exist within the same physics boundaries than human beings and time was nothing but a poorly lit footpath. What would this fictional being feel about our disgraces and victories? Would he feel sorrow for us, for the way time leaves us dry and dejected? Or maybe he would envy us, for the way we feel emotions, deeper and more vivid than he will ever do?

Mayan culture had a different philosophy about time, they viewed history as a cycle destined to repeat itself (from there, the idea of reincarnation) and at the same time, they believed humans could have an influence over that cycle, that way, manufacturing a new idea about free will and how, even if an event is predestined, it is us humans, who hold the last word. Curiously, the Mayan word for “sun” is the same one as for “day” and “time”, they worshiped stars in such a way, that they ascribe to them the existence of time, as if the great cosmic mass that surround us was responsible for the movement of the unruly tidal wave, a not so crazy idea if you think about it.

In July of 1967, the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell, discovered the existences of some curious objects named “Pulsars”, neutron stars that cast radiation in equal intervals, like a clock that goes tic-tac far beyond the limits of our domains. We can interpret this interesting natural phenomena like a clue, that, to understand time, we must regard far away, farther than the past and future bounded by our own lives, and understand that from the perspective of that gigantic clock ticking in outer space, our existence is nothing but a grain of sand, and so it will keep shining, even after the last human being can not admire it’s beauty anymore and the last plant on earth returns to the ground, but even that star will eventually fade.

Time is strangely attached to death and disorder. A somewhat easier way to explain it is using the physical concept of entropy, an invisible arrow that is always aiming towards disorder, and which most important variable is time. Is in this magnitude where we find the answer to one of the world’s greatest questions: Why do events happen the way they do? Why when a rod of boiling metal and a block of ice get in contact, it is the ice the one that ends up giving in? It is the tendency of any physical system towards disorder, which destroys the block of ice, it is this invincible arrow which steadily gravitates our lives towards the unavoidable oblivion. It is horrible and bizarre, but it is mother nature who predisposed it that way, as mysterious as well as random and extraordinary, showing us our finale, even when we are still at the starting line.

Human beings have always known this, or at least, it is an idea that, like a mute whisper, has always been hunting the back of our minds. That is why, now it is our turn to do something amazing with those crumbs of time, something like wonderful art, or spectacular science, something like making the ones we love laugh until their ribs hurt, or like reading every book that we come across and eating every feast that we can get our hands on. But above else, to love, to love with every single one of our cells, from the top of our tongue to the last hair in our chin, and then, when every winter has vanished, to pass this story to our sons and daughters, a story about how we deciphered the meaning of life in a block of ice and even though they will not understand it at first, it will dictate their life’s from the moment of their birth, and when they finally understand it, their souls will burn with an inexplicable fire when they realize that they only have one another for as long as a blink lasts.