Recently on Facebook I came across a post that caught my attention enough for me to respond to it. A friend had shared a photo of a field, desolate and gray, overrun with clocks. In the foreground, a man in a business suit stands beside one, head down and clearly distraught, while the caption of the photo reads, “Time does not exist.” It went on to discuss how time is a construct based off of the Earth's rotation around the Sun, and thus the strange hold it has over our lives is imaginary and detrimental because we have forgot its true illusory nature. I remember reading it over my boyfriend's shoulder as he scrolled through his feed and saying immediately,
“While that's interesting, it's fundamentally incorrect.”
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He didn't indulge in my statement and avoided asking why, but I plowed on anyway, explaining my objections to the photo's argument and providing evidence and counterarguments until eventually I picked up my own laptop and responded, something I usually don't do on Facebook. We both figured that would be the end of it, but to my surprise, the photo's statement has been playing around in my mind for the last five days since I first saw it. While it is incorrect (time must exist or else everything would happen at once) it does say a lot about the mindset of someone who would agree with that stand point. Ignoring all of the bunk physics that the photo puts forth, it postulates that we as human beings have become slaves to “Time” which is intangible and therefore truly unimportant to our lives. This idea keeps bouncing around in my mind because, while I do agree that time is intangible (as in there is no way for us to affect our time relative to everything else without greatly increasing our speed), I can't agree that we have become slaves to some inane measurement, the way that people get tethered to their Instagram followers or retweets.
Time is beyond important in our lives for many reasons, all of which harken back to what I would phrase one's purpose for living. Socrates believed in striving for personal excellence, and I decided a long while ago that I didn't want to just live my life and be mediocre, that I didn't want to waste my life just trying to get by, so the time I have left on this world means a lot to me. How can I best spend it? How can I ensure that I am improving myself and not just screwing around? It all comes down to time management, having a clear understanding of the present and the future and the mistakes of the past. I'm enrolled in a course called Mind/Body Fusion. It's a combination of yoga and relaxation training. My professor, when discussing stress, likes to say that the future is imaginary, and I assume she means the same thing the creator of the photograph meant when he/she said that time is imaginary. Both of them want us to slow down, to breathe, and to exist where we are now in life and to live that way, but while that is useful for relaxing, it is not a lifestyle I could foster 24/7. Perhaps it's because the future, a better future in which I have attained my goals and am able to set loftier ones is what motivates me day to day. I have to keep sight of where I want to be, or else I fear that by the time I'm 35, I might be on the threshold of a life I never wanted with no way to turn back. I will admit, however, that my professor is older than me and probably knows more about how to live happily than I do, so to each her own.
