Time to talk about time.

"Light from the stellar explosion that created Cassiopeia A is thought to have reached Earth about 300 years ago, after traveling 11,000 years to get here. While the star is long dead, its remains are still bursting with action. The outer blue ring is where the shock wave from the supernova blast is slamming into surrounding material, whipping particles up to within a fraction of a percent of the speed of light. NuSTAR observations should help solve the riddle of how these particles are accelerated to such high energies." 

I poached the picture and description above from NASA's website. If you ever get a chance, visit their Image of the Day website @ http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html

Is there anything as consistent as the progression of time? One second passes, followed by 59 more. There, we have a minute. Another 59 of those pass and we have an hour. 23 hours later and you have a day. 365 days and you have a year... Wait, is it a leap year? It is? OK then. Give that short, gimpy month of February an extra day. Oops, I forgot about Daylight savings. Go back and take an hour from March and hand it over to November so that, uh, I forget why. Anyway, make sure they don't bicker. Hmm, maybe time isn't as consistent as I thought.

Time. So many ways it can be measured and thought about. Before our sophisticated tools and technologies, earlier humans (subtle time reference there) would use what they witnessed in the world and sky around them to track time: the lengthening or shortening of days, the position of the sun in the sky or the movement of stars and planets. With time (ha, another one) we came to develop greater means for measuring and tracking time. It can be tracked down to milliseconds and beyond. This, of course, has its benefits. Imagine the pointlessness of modern sports without time. I suppose a point based system could still be used, but that is so absolute. The exhilaration lies within that final 30 seconds of a college basketball game, when any team could win, simply by playing the clock the right way or making the right shot. I’ll get into this later.

Immanuel Kant believed that time was a built-in intuitive or cognitive mechanism to the human mind. In such, it is much more relational that absolute. Certainly, you can agree that there is a relational aspect to how we experience time. Sure I can say I was born in 1980. That is a number that I can subtract from the current year of 2013 and arrive at an approximation of how many years I've been alive on this planet. However, my perception of the expanse of time and how quickly it passes has shifted as I have aged. When I was a child, an uncle of mine explained it to me with a clean example that has always stuck with me. This is it:

When you are five years old and another year passes, that represents only a fifth of everything you have known. When you are twenty, a year represents a twentieth. When you are ninety, a year only stands for a fraction of your life. In this way, time slips away from us, or at least in our perception.

The example I just issued should be easy to grasp. Instead of examining our relation to time over the broad swath of a life, let us look at it from the momentary instant. 

“Time stood still.” You have heard this before. It typically occurs when something remarkably mesmerizing, profound or traumatic is taking place- Your eyes fall upon the most beautiful woman you have ever seen and suddenly the only thing you experience is her and your heartbeat; You witness a horrific car accident as it occurs, sparks flying and metal crushing as two-ton objects become airborne when they should rightfully stay on the ground; You realize a new truth and your world shifts, never to be looked at the same way again. In these examples, our minds are being inundated with some new experience that caught us off guard. Perhaps the perception of time stopping is a defense mechanism to the influx of dopamine, adrenaline or something else that our brain is experiencing.

Our perception of time can also be altered, not just by moments, but by external substances. Alcohol, marijuana and entheogens all have this ability to make time speed up, slow down or disappear all together. I would love to dive into these examples right now, but I will leave them for another post.

Allow me to return to the image that got me started on this thread: the one of the stellar explosion. As a young adult, I learned that objects visible in our night’s sky do not represent an accurate view of everything out there at this moment in time. Instead, rather interestingly, the lights we see in the night sky represent points of time. These stars and galaxies exist thousands or millions, if not billions of light years away. Meaning, it takes their distance in time for their light to reach us. Think about that- (their distance from us)(in time). It was both sad and profound to learn that you could be viewing light from a massive object that died off half a billion years ago.

Time then takes on another meaning. We can be experiencing things as if they are real and sitting right next to us in the flesh, even though their time has long since faded. Take that thought and apply it to some aspects of religion, politics, values or whatever you choose. You will begin to see the point I’m making.