According to Isaac Newton, absolute time exists independently from anyone perceiving it, and it progresses at a constant pace throughout the universe.
According to Albert Einstein, time is not absolute, but intertwined with space and affected by gravity and speed (he also believed that the separation of past, present, and future was a “stubbornly persistent illusion”).
Stephen Hawking held that time began at the Big Bang, along with everything else.
The arrow of time moves from the past toward the future. There is no reversing of time’s arrow.
In my everyday life, time behaves as Newton’s independent dimension. It marches on, regardless of what’s going on in my life. I age a year at the same rate, whether I’m twenty going on twenty-one or eighty-four going on eighty-five. The clocks keep ticking and I move from cradle to grave.
But at the extremes – subatomic or cosmically large – time gets wonky. It’s so married to space that it becomes one half of a compound name: spacetime (space/time, space-time, you get the drift).
But scientists aren’t the only ones vexed by time. Philosophers and theologians were dealing with this headache long before modernity: is time an internal sense of duration, or an ordered relation of events? Is the time I experience, which isn’t quite so orderly or constant [sitting in traffic for 20 minutes feels a lot longer than watching a 45ish minute episode of Doctor Who (Okay, the old ones were 25 minutes, but you get the Time And Relative Dimensions In Space drift)], as real as the time that passes in orderly minutes and hours? How does God fit into time, stand outside of time, create time, enter time, redeem time, sustain time? What about past, present, and future – are they real, or something that helps me keep what I’ve done, what I’m doing, and what I might do in some kind of order? Yikes!
But if I take a deep breath, then really consider time, something emerges out of all this talk – something as profound as it is simple: my time is limited. Whether time exists in creation or outside it really doesn’t affect the reality of my own personal expiration date. My moments pass and cannot be regained. Soon enough, I’ll return to the dust from which I was made.
A lot of things I might consider important drop away when I accept and embrace the limited time I have on this earth. Letting go of jealousy, sarcasm, and one-upmanship becomes easier. Loving what does count – love, kindness, joy, others – just might get a little easier, too.
My favorite Grateful Dead song, melodic and wise…
