It is extremely common for me to set my watch timer, both at work and home. Sometimes it’s a reminder – my watch will start beeping seemingly out of the blue and I’ll have to piece together what it is I was supposed to remember. Most of the time that’s something like “take the recyclables out”. Other times it gives me an instant deadline. Today, after poking into a meeting and being told I could come back in a half hour, I set the watch for 26:00. I don’t even look at it most of the time. I arrived back with 8 seconds to spare.
During that 26 minutes, it didn’t matter what time of day it was. It didn’t matter the day of the week. It didn’t even matter what year it was. I could have been 24 or 64, decades younger or older. It didn’t matter. Time is a relative quantity, a local quantity. Time exists because cause and effect exist. My entire universe was synced up to a 26:00 timer. Nothing else mattered.
Time is not a thing. Yes, there is a locally absolute time here on earth. It is related to the decay of cesium. Maybe the rotational rate of a pulsar.
It is completely arbitrary. Why should my day be predicated by the decay rate of some obscure element? Or the rotation of the earth around its axis? Or the rotation of the planet around the sun? Or, if we lived a lot longer, the rotation of the sun around the galactic center?
Time is a local phenomenon. It only makes sense in a causal universe. One thing happens, and another thing follows it. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that someone quantified the spaces in between. It lets me compare it to other similar periods of time, however ineffectively. A year is a long ass amount of time. A year ago, I was…sheesh, that was only a year? Two years ago, plus three months, I was running 90 mile weeks. It’s been that long already?
A decade, a year, and a few days ago we won the state meet. Thirteen years and two weeks ago I was writing on my computer at home “I will make states, I will make states” in every font that Word Perfect had. Two decades ago I was reading Pachycephalosaurus in Miss Lyons class.
If time is based only on cause and effect, its passage only can occur when the effects come to pass. But what if those events lay in an uncertain future? How do you move forward? How do you grow up? How does time pass? It will be a year from some unknown day in the future. How long is that? My clock is broken. I can’t live from event to event and that is my problem. I look to a future that I can’t see over the horizon, while all the other timers in my life count hopelessly toward nothing in particular. You can’t live for effects, especially ones that don’t even exist yet. The clock will tick, and I will be one second closer to the end of my existence on this planet. There’s no time to lose. Causes don’t have effects until the effects happen. Before then they are just causes. That arbitrary tick of the clock is the only effect.
A series of events, heralded by an endless accumulation of ticks of a clock. I remember the past but can’t see the future – therefore time is moving forward. Time points from event, to event, to event. And then one day you die, unfulfilled. And what happens to time? Does cesium decay in heaven?
Words 
To say that you will be unfulfilled is to say that you can predict the future. I doubt that a lot. If you approach the future with hopes and dreams, then you may create a cause that has an unamaginable effect. Just as time relentlessly marches on, moments can last forever. They can be conjured up outside the perameters of time. For example, if you conjure up the moment when you won the state meet at 800m, you’ll remember it as if it were yesterday. You’ll probably even remember the feel of the air, and even some of the sounds. Good stuff. Let time pass but go through it with an attitude that some hopes and dreams will be realized. Just have faith and eventually you will know why you got to live through this window of time. My medication is now kicking in. I’ll be much better tomorrow.
I think it’s safe to say that your son’s medication has already kicked in, Mr. Furst! If by “medication” here we mean “experimental psychotropic drugs that one ingests to watch the Wizard of Oz whilst listening to Dark Side of the Moon”…
I’ve never done that, and won’t do it of my own volition any time soon. The Pink Floyd thing I mean.
When we were growing up my grandfather would have us fetch him beer by saying “go get me some of my medicine…” Good times all around.
[…] is a tricky thing. The universe, as I mentioned recently is causal. Try to clap in a stadium – it’s impossible to sync the entire stadium up as people […]