Sleepy Musings: What Time Is It?

Time, for me, is one of the most interesting quandaries of the universe. On one hand, it's so fleeting, always inching forward on an endless reel of life and death. It's a force that simply keeps on moving, and try as we might to hinder it, we can never keep the seconds from turning into minutes, minutes into hours, and the hours inevitably turning into an unfathomable eternity.

Time is also absolute. It progresses but never changes; it moves and yet doesn't seem to go anywhere. It passes by and leaves snapshots of the past, writing an eternal record of circumstances that we can look back on but never alter. Sometimes we realize  that each moment that expires is ultimately set in stone,  and when this happens we are attacked by a wave of nostalgia-slash-regret that makes us wish that it really was as simple as turning back the hands of a clock.

To say the least, it's confusing. We look forward and see seconds that we wish to catch up to, and yet we turn around to see the very same seconds already left behind. The definitions of our past, present, and future get blurred and jumbled to the point that we don't even know when we're living anymore. This sentence you're reading, for example, is already part of my past and yet to me it's something I'm still writing and rewriting at this very moment. No, wait. Perhaps it's the future that's already come to pass?

I realize, then, how lucky we are that humans don't have the attention span to really stop and try to comprehend everything around us. Otherwise, we might all frozen in place by now, overwhelmed by the understanding of the sheer complexity of a seemingly simply concept such as time. As it is now, we have many questions but not quite a lot of answers, and that's okay. 

Time, for me, is one of the most interesting quandaries of the universe. An hour ago I didn't really expect to be writing anything philosophical/scientific/bullshitty, but look where I am now. Of course, I could always just delete this or let it sit in my tablet forever, but ultimately the decison is mine to make. In any case, there's no turning back.