we look at the clock
but we don’t know whether
it’s morning or night
the clock is only able
to give us so much information
without the rest
we have no idea of the
when
life’s a lot like that
we rarely have all the information
we need
to know
what’s actually going on
we just act
as if we do
because
we rarely have
any other choice
Photo: Iblrahima Toure
Unslash
Time City
housed ten million people
each implanted
with a silver Time chip
at birth
people lived
and died
by the clock
each chip
was randomly coded
with a time limit
how long you lived
was determined
by how much time
your chip held
when you reached your limit
the chip shut down
and so did you
Photo: Pixabay
My friend had a Rolex with diamonds around it. It was in the shop so much she bought a Timex and wore that because it worked all the time and never broke.
“What is it?” he asked, watching her turn the archeological find over in her heavily gloved hands.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it’s a time catcher.”
“I think you’re right,” he said, taking it from her. “They counted with it.”
“Yes, hours and days, I think. That’s what it said in the books we found.”
“I like the way it looks. It’s heavy.”
She nodded. “Time was heavy for them. They didn’t have very much of it.”
“And they wasted the time they did have, fighting, killing and preaching.”
“Put it into storage and we’ll bring it back with us,” she said. “Add it to the collection.”
“I bet this was a nice planet at one time.”
“That’s what you say about every planet humans have destroyed,” she sighed.
“Well, it’s true,” he said. “I bet it was.”
“If the stories are true, then yes. They could breath the air and there was water everywhere.”
“Hard to imagine now,” he said, looking at the charred and dead ground.
“They did it to themselves.”
“They always did. I still hate to see another beautiful planet dead because of them.”
“It’s all they knew how to do. They killed everything. But they’re gone now.”
“That’s what they said last time,” he said, checking his air gauge.
“They got all of them this time.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said.
“We better get back to the ship,” she mumbled, grabbing a bag of artifacts. “This place just feels wrong.”
when you live in a world
run by time
unless you have time on your hands
every second counts
there’s no time to waste
because time flies
and when you run out of time
it’s over
“What is time?” she asked, standing in front of the enormous clock.
“Time doesn’t exist,” answered the clock, sleepily.
“I thought you were going to say that by having time, we stop everything from happening at the same time.”
The clock thought for a moment, then said, “Everything IS happening at the same time, and what’s with the ‘we? You don’t do anything a all.'”
“But there is time. Time has to exist,” she said. “It moves forward. We live, we age, we die.”
“That’s not time. What you’re thinking of goes in EVERY direction at once. That’s why everything is happening at the same time.”
“Does it go sideways?”
“Yes.”
“Backward?”
“Of course, and before you ask, it goes un and down as well and everywhere in between.”
“If that’s true then…”
“What do you mean IF that’s true? I’m telling you it’s true.”
“Yes, but how do I know that you know what you’re talking about?”
“I can’t believe you said that,” said the clock, shaking it’s hands.
“Well, there’s no way for me to tell…”
“Why are you asking me questions if you aren’t going to believe my answers?”
“That’s a good question.”
“Yes. I know. That’s why I asked it.”
“Why can’t I go backward?”
“Can you ask that same question without repeating it? I mean can you go back to when you said it and say it anew, withOUT repeating yourself?”
“You know that I can’t,” she said, frowning at the clock.
“Well if you can’t redo, or go back to what you did three minutes ago, how can you possibly expect to go back to the distant past?”
“What if I stopped your hands from moving?”
“What if you did?”
“Would time keep going?”
“I’m a clock. I’m not time. Time doesn’t exist, remember? I simply represent what you believe to be time. All I do is count for you.”
“Oh, I see,” she said thoughtfully. “I guess I knew that.”
“I hope so,” sighed the clock. “You can’t move forward either. You’re always in a steady state, never moving at all. Things just flow past you while you remain where you are.”
“How is that possible?”
“Can you move a few minutes ahead of what you call time? No. You can’t. You can’t do anything, don’t you know that? You never move. Ever. Everything else moves but you are stationary. Get it? You can’t move forward or backward, you can only exit in the present MOMENT. Your entire existence is played out one moment at a time. That’s ALL there is for you. A moment you can’t repeat, nor can you move into the next moment because the next moment is already already part of your past. You can’t stop the moments from washing over you and you can’t catch them or bring them back You exist in a flow of moments that go so quickly you don’t notice them, so you bundle them up into hours, days and years, to make yourselves feel better.”
“What?”
“Time can’t exist because there are only moments. Moments exist, not time.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” she asked.
“I didn’t think of it.”
“Oh.”
“You can’t SEE into the future or into the past because while they are currently happening, they don’t actually exist. I mean you can’t open a door and walk into tomorrow, while it’s still today.”
“It seems as if we should be able to do that. The movies say WE come back from the future to save ourselves from extinction.”
“Do you sit in those reclining seats and order Nachos?”
“No. I don’t like them and I don’t order Nachos.”
“I’ve heard they’re good.”
“How is it that you can speak?”
“If you didn’t think I could talk, why did you ask me questions?”
“Fair point,” she said smiling. “Are you the same thing that’s in all clocks?”
“Pretty much but I’m like you. All humans are made up of the same stuff but you’re all different as well.”
“So you all have different personalities?”
“Not exactly but that’s close enough.”
“You’re intelligent,” she said.”
“Everything is intelligent we just dumb ourselves down for your human pea sized brains.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.”
“Really?” laughed the clock. “Look at what your doing. Look at the destruction, the stupid killing of EVERYTHING, then tell me you have a working brain cell. If you only knew whats actually around you. But no one wants to be around you, so everything remains silent. You’re too dangerous and dumb.”
“Well, I think I’ve been insulted enough for one day,” she said, turning to go.
“There’s that pride and ego again.”
“Excuse me?” she snapped.
“Your species thinks it’s sooooo special. Well let me tell you that it’s NOT. You’re just riding this rock along with everything else. Your actual abilities are pathetic, you can barely feed your selves and your attitude is blind, but that’s okay, I have an attitude too, I guess. At least that’s what some of the other clocks have said.”
“Maybe everything has an attitude.”
“Maybe,” sighed the clock. “So you get the whole time thing? That it doesn’t exist and neither does the past or future but they are both taking place right now? Do you want me to tell you about parallel universes and how many different lives you are living at this very moment?”
“Maybe another day,” she said, smiling at the clock. “Catch ya next TIME,” she laughed, as she waved goodbye.
“Bet you can’t say that again for the first time,” he called.
She didn’t turn, but the clock could hear her laughing.
There is no way to think about life, without time. It’s strange, when you think about it, because time is actually something we made up. If we never started measuring it, making watches and clocks, how would we function? We rush around trying to be on time for this or that, because whatever we do we’re either early, on time, or late.
We measure minutes, seconds and milliseconds. We time races, games, work, what time we eat. We get up and go to bed, according to the clock. We waste time and use it constructively. We run out of it and have time on our hands.
I wonder how life would have evolved if we never measured time. Maybe we would still be living in caves, rising with the sun and sleeping when it went down. No work, no place to be. Sounds pretty boring, but then I can’t even think about living…without thinking about time. We always know the clock is ticking.
Pixabay
I’d like you to meet Time. Well, Time is her last name, Endless is her first. You were probably expecting an old guy called father. What is it with men being called father all the time (no pun intended, believe me)? It’s always father this and father that. How patriarchal can they get? Anyway, Time has always been a woman and she’s no one’s mother. She can take any form she’d like but she has a thing for old world dresses, so she usually looks like she does in this picture. She’s been a muse for many creative people and likes to play in our dreams, so you may have already met her.
She said that Time is an illusion and there’s always enough of it. Actually, she said there’s always the right amount of it. It never goes too fast, or too slow, our perception just makes us look at things that way. She said it’s impossible to have “Time on our hands.” We can’t hold time and any pictures we see of her are just human ideas of what we think she might look like.
She said she has always existed and there is no such thing as nothing. The “Big Bang,” didn’t start from nothing because you can’t get something FROM nothing. She thinks the concepts of how we began are simply too advanced for our tiny minds.
She is often portrayed on railroad tracts because she wants us to understand that Time flows in all directions at once. She said the tracks are her way of getting us to think about Time running in at least two directions…the past and the future and she wants us to know that everything is happening at the same time. The thing is…there are no directions. We made them up so it would be easier to describe things and find our way home. In fact. up and down, right and left, are relative to where you are standing. They are not fixed in space and Time.
“Think of it this way,” she said. “If you look down the tracks, you can only see so far. But just because you have limited vision doesn’t mean that things down the tracks don’t exist. Either way you look, backward, or forward (again, made up concepts), something is going on, ad infinitum. I mean, there IS no end to anything. Even the tiniest thing came from something, or always existed. Everything that can exist, under the given conditions, has existed, will exist, or is currently existing, in whatever form it takes, because of it’s immediate environment. If you put water into a freezer it will change into a solid but if you melt it, it once again becomes a liquid. So the components are always there, they simply react to the environment. That’s the way it works. No MIRACLES, just things acting and adjusting to their environment. The water isn’t dead forever, when it turns solid. Nothing really dies, it just changes form. At any rate, if you could build railroad tracks into space, you could ride forever. The things you left behind would continue on…because everything exists at the same time. Somewhere dinosaurs are walking across the open plains. They are just too far down the road to be seen. All the other lives you have lived are there as well.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“You really can’t,” she said, seriously.
“Well, Time’s up, my Time is valuable, Time’s a wasting, Time to get going….”
“Enough,” laughed Time. “Just go.”
So I did.
Rethinking Life 
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