Contemplating time

Two sisters and the ocean

I don't get on Facebook often any more, but when I do, it regularly reminds me of pictures that I posted long ago. This one showed up that was taken exactly nine years ago yesterday, when I was visiting my sister Norma Jean in Florida. I sure do like to look at it and remember when it happened. We have passed through nine years of time, and today we are different but the same. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to travel to Florida for the past two years because of the pandemic and my unwillingness to expose myself to air travel and all its difficulties.

The entire concept of time has fascinated me lately. One morning when I was sitting in meditation it occurred to me that I have spent eight decades of life breathing in, breathing out, and most of the time it's completely unconscious. Breath, however, is one of those bodily functions that can be regulated through intention. Most of the time, however, it's not, it just flows in and out without ceasing. In my meditation, I count my breaths from one to ten and then begin again. When I first started this practice, I would often find myself thinking of something and forgetting about my breath, realizing that my mind had once again drifted into thought instead of concentrating on my breath. The technique I am using tells me not to worry about it, just return to the breath and start again, counting, pausing at the beginning and end of each breath. It's an amazingly simple but I have found it's a profound technique for centering oneself.

I have a morning routine, as most of us do, I suspect. The first thing I do after awakening (and using the bathroom) is to make myself a cup of tea, get my laptop and return to my bed, propping myself up with pillows and settling back down into my still-warm cozy comforter. SG usually is roused enough to visit the bathroom and then comes back to his side of the bed. He is so accustomed to my routine that it doesn't bother him at all and is soon back to sleep next to me as I check my email, read the morning news of the day, and read my friends' blog posts that have appeared since I last checked them. The only day that this routine varies is on Sunday, when I come back to bed with the task of writing a post, which is what I am doing now. 

One thing I also do every morning is check what's on the APOD website (Astronomy Picture of the Day), and today it's a picture taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 of Planet Earth. I think we have all seen this picture many times, but it never fails to awaken a sense of awe in me when I gaze at it. Often I see a distant galaxy that I am told is millions of light-years away. What the heck does that mean anyway? What is a light-year? Well, it's the time it takes for light to travel from the galaxy to Earth, and when something is 4.2 light-years away, for example, that means it takes more than four years for its image to reach our eyes.

A light-year is a measurement of distance and not time (as the name might imply). A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in a single Earth year, which equates to approximately 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers). (Space.com)

Philosophers and scholars have contemplated time and the meaning we ascribe to it ever since there have been, well, people. It's pretty fascinating to think of it, and lately it's been on my mind a lot. As I approach another decade of life on this planet, I think of who I was, who I am now, and who I want to become: past, present, future all at once. It's obvious I don't really know anything about it in an objective sense, because time is not objective. Linear time and subjective time are not the same. I found a fascinating link on Wikipedia called "time perception," and I got lost in reading about this concept, which I think is well worth your time (haha). It turns out that different species have different scales of time:

There is empirical evidence that metabolic rate has an impact on animals' ability to perceive time. In general, it is true within and across taxa that animals of smaller size (such as flies), which have a fast metabolic rate, experience time more slowly than animals of larger size, which have a slow metabolic rate.  Researchers suppose that this could be the reason why small-bodied animals are generally better at perceiving time on a small scale, and why they are more agile than larger animals.

Well, that explains why it's so hard to successfully swat a fly! And my ability to get engrossed in a story causes me to "lose track of time." I really didn't realize when I set out to write a post about time that I would end up getting mired down in all the different concepts and theories of what it is and whether it is even real at all. 

Ever since I was a kid, I've been interested in the concept of time travel and have read many of the sci-fi stories about it. There are words in my vocabulary that don't actually exist, such as an ansible. That is a fictional device capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no delay. It made perfect sense in the stories I read that it would exist, but then again, considering what we do know about time, it's about as likely to exist as time travel itself. Makes for a good story, though.

I suppose that since philosophers and religious scholars have spent eons studying time, it makes sense that I would get lost in discovery while trying to write a simple blog post about Time. That one link discusses the major concepts, fields of study, philosophy, religion, science, and much more. That might explain why every time I tried to find a simple description of it, I got bogged down in fascinating concepts.

And I do realize that there is so much more to know and study about it, and that I should just give up for now and spend some time doing my daily Wordle instead of trying to merge centuries of thought into something I can't explain. However, I certainly do enjoy being stretched like this, and learning something new about time and spacetime. But I've got a life to be lived, and I'm stuck in the circadian rhythm of everyday activities, some of which have gotten delayed by my endeavor to write about time.

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot. — Michael Altshuler

Which means now that my tea is gone, my dear partner still sleeps next to me, and the post is written, such as it is. I will be spending some more time on those two links, about time and time perception, because I hardly scratched the surface of all that interesting discourse. And this time pilot is looking forward to spending the rest of my day in happy pursuits. Hopefully, you will too. Until we meet again next week, dear virtual family, I wish you the best and most timely of weeks.