Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today(ish) I was thinking about time and how easy it is for it to slip away.
Douglas Adams said "Time is an illusion - lunchtime doubly so." And, although this appears to be nothing more than a throwaway line from one of his Hitchhiker's Guide characters, it's remarkably astute.
When you think about it, time is a ridiculously bizarre concept. Humans have attempted to make some sense of it by dividing into chunks and giving those chunks names like 'Seconds', 'Minutes', 'Hours', 'Days', etc. However, we are the only creatures on earth (that we're aware of) that have done this. (*Surreptitiously looks towards the dolphins*) There is no proof - nor is it potentially possible to prove - that we are correct in this. There is no evidence that time is constant and therefore the sensation of time moving faster and slower could theoretically be correct.
In fact, it has been proven to be true that time dilation exists due to gravitational forces with atomic clocks at different altitudes being shown to eventually show different times.
Albert Einstein theorised that time is relative to the observer so maybe time is a purely individual experience for everyone.
At the end of the day, time could be said to be nothing more than something we created to make sense of what's around us.
It could further be pointed out that we humans took the frankly ridiculous idea, not only of portioning out arbitrarily but punishing each other for not abiding by strict limits we set ourselves. As Dave Allen astutely pointed out:
"You wake to the clock, you go to work to the clock, you clock-in to the clock, you clock out to the clock, you come home to the clock, you eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock, you get up to the clock, you go back to work to the clock... You do that for forty years of your life and you retire — what do they fucking give you? A clock!"
