“Time is clearly not our natural dimension. Thus it is that we are never really at home in time. Alternately, we find ourselves wishing to hasten the passage of time or to hold back the dawn. We can do neither, of course, but whereas the fish is at home in the water, we are clearly not home in time – because we belong to eternity. Time, as much as any one thing, whispers to us that we are strangers here.” ~ Neal A. Maxwell
I can’t believe a friend posted this quote today because I’ve been thinking about writing about time for a while now. I think I’m a pretty smart guy, but the older I get the less I understand some things and one of the most basic things in this existence is time. Ironically, it’s the one thing that has me the most baffled and it’s only getting worse.
Physicists like Einstein have been telling us for a long time that time is relative, not absolute. The faster you move the slower time is. If you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) time would stand still. I’ve seen videos trying to explain this phenomenon showing if we could move in certain directions relative to Earth we could slow down or speed up time. Then, I heard “before” the Big Bang, there was no time. Time “started” when the Big Bang happened. I use quotation marks because it’s wrong to say “before” the Big Bang as there is no “before” if there is no time, but time is so baked into our language, there’s no way around using it. As if that’s not bad enough, now they’re telling us time doesn’t even really exist. Time is an illusion, a construct of the human brain, a way of us organizing events, but it’s not real. Well, it sure seems real to me. And I cannot wrap my brain around “non-time”. I keep running across the concept of time as I study the after life and the more I read about it, the more confused I become. I just don’t get it.
The other thing that strikes me about time is it always seems to be our enemy. It’s never moving at the pace we want it to. When we were kids the months of January and February (after the holidays and before summer break) seemed like they went on forever, but the three months of June, July and August, summer break, flew by. Christmas only being every 365 days seemed like an eternity away the day after it had passed.
When I was young, I couldn’t wait to be older, to be an adult, to be on my own. Then, when I had kids, I wanted to slow time down to keep the girls young forever. If I could I’d freeze time at around the ages of 4 for Shayna and 7 for Kayla and just live like Ground Hog Day (the movie) in an endless loop of those years. After Shayna’s passing, time cannot go fast enough for me. Time is all that stands between me and her now and every single day, every single second that passes I move closer to where I want to be.
