Time is most definitely a relative concept. Think back to when you were younger. Didn’t time seem to move much more slowly? The wait for the end of the school year, a birthday, or another important event seemed to take forever. Summer afternoons were long and lazy; scary nights endless and lonely. We felt as though we’d never grow up, that those milestones in life
would never arrive, and we hated the never-ending wait for the day when we would be in control of our own destiny.
Adult time is completely different. Our days, weeks, and months rush past in the blink of a busy eye. Birthdays and holidays are here and gone before we realize what’s happening. We no longer have the luxury of lazy summer days, nor do we really notice the length of a cold winter night. The seconds and minutes of life pass us by so fast that they no longer register
and we soon start wondering where all our time has gone.
Many of us can, and do, change time by switching our clocks. Every four years we add a day to our year. Different cultures even follow different calendars. How could we do those things if time were real? Evidence indicates that we humans have been obsessed with tracking time throughout the course of our existence. The earliest people tracked the passage of days and lunar cycles by very simple means that have evolved along with us to become the modern system we all know and, sometimes, hate. We want to save the time that we often waste handling annoying tasks. We want to make time to do things we enjoy. We’d like to have more time for ourselves, our friends, and our families. We’d like to extend the amount of time we live.
The more scientific among us would have you believe that time is a real concept and they would be right to some extent. Nature does keep time of a sort. Day passes into night and into new day again. Seasons change. We change. Yet the time we keep is a concept created by us to help regulate life. The numbers on our clocks and watches help us function as a society. Without time we would have chaos because none of us would know when to be where we need to be.
Time is an unpleasant but necessary function yet time is not concrete. We do need to remember that time is a relative concept that can be bent to our will and we should remember not to take it so seriously.
