Time Slips Away

Continuing with the theme of posts relating to Time, the awareness of its passage seems to be something that is rather unique to humanity, insofar as we can tell.  Whilst other animals display an awareness of day and night cycles, and the changing seasons, humans seem to be the only species that can measure time and understand the concept, not surprising since the concept as a whole is a human invention.  Humans didn't invent time itself but we did define it, through seconds, hours, minutes, days, weeks, months, years, and everything else we use to measure its passage.  What remains persistent across all of these measurements is that their lengths are arbitrary.

The only measurement that has a modicum of truth or basis in something other than a human delimitation is a year, however even at that, what we measure to be a year in length isn't what we claim it to be.  We claim a year to be the amount of time it takes Earth to complete one orbit of the Sun, however that's not actually true.  A year in more precise measurement lasts 365.25 days, this is why every 4 years we add a day to compensate for the inaccuracy.  There is no single day that appears in our calendars across those 4 years that appears out of nowhere, the Earth doesn't take an extra day to orbit the Sun every 4 years, the reality is that the 0.25 days per year discrepancy comes about as consequence of the fact that a day is not 24 hours in length, but 24.0164 hours in length, again we use rounding and ignore the discrepancy allowing the offset to accumulate and then adjust our calendars to compensate.  Even when you drill down further to hours, minutes, and seconds, the delimitation of each is arbitrary.  There is no reason there has to be 24 hours in the day it could be more it could be less if you change the duration of an hour.  An hour in itself is 60 minutes, again an arbitrary number there is no reason why it has to be 60.  As for seconds themselves they too are arbitrarily set to 60, there's no actual reason for doing so.

The length of a second is one of the most fundamental measurements of time, and again, its duration is arbitrary.  There's no underlying reason for setting it to the duration we have agreed upon.  This isn't just something related to time, it is related to all forms of measurement that we have created and the standards that surround them, and it is not limited to imperial systems it applies to other systems of measurement that attempts to structure things more logically such as the metric system based on delimitations of 10.  In the metric system the Kilogram is a measurement of weight, which is equivalent to 1000 grams, but how much each of those weigh, again, is arbitrary.  The Kilogram itself is related primarily to the International Prototype Kilogram which is stored in France at the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements.

Despite there being widespread acceptance of these international standards and a collective agreement of the delimitation of each unit, the fact they are arbitrary makes them rather hard to imagine precisely.  We become dazed and confused quite easily when we have to accurately picture these measurements in our mind.  With regards to time this comes most easily in the example of our perception of how much time has passed since a given event.  Anything that did not happen in our lifetime we estimate to be much further back in time than it was in reality, whilst things that did happen in our lifetime we estimate as happening much more recently than it actually occurred.

Take for example the invention of the Television.  The first forms of it emerged in the 1920s and it became widespread in the 1950s.  For anyone under 70 the widespread adoption of Television did not happen in your lifetime, and for anyone under 98 the invention did not happen in your lifetime either.  For both, the natural assumption is to place it further back in time than it actually happened. 

Whereas with events that did happen in our lifetime, perhaps those most memorable are those of great tragedy, the 9/11 world trade centre attacks, the 7/7 London bombings, or the Bataclan Theatre massacre, all of which happened in 2001, 2005, and 2015 respectively.  These dates are 18 years ago, 14 years ago, and 4 years ago respectively this year.  Others are much closers in time and still fresh such as the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.  These events so horrific in nature stand out in our minds, and the clarity of the memories we hold from the time they occurred leads us to believe they happened much more recently than they actually did.  It is hard to believe so much time has actually passed since each of these events, yet that is the reality of time, it moves forever forward whether we acknowledge it or not.

Time is progressing, and our lives are growing longer day by day.  As the saying goes time is like a fistful of sand, the tighter you grasp it the quicker it slips through your fingers.  There is a balance that is hard to find, of living in the moment and being present and letting go.  Perhaps this is why time seems to accelerate for us with age?  We try to grasp it tighter as we grow older, desperate to hold onto it but the harder we hold it the faster it slips away from us.  Therein lies the paradox, how do you hold on whilst letting go, how do you see the detail whilst still seeing the big picture, how do you find precision and measurement without becoming ignorant of the very thing you are trying to measure in the first place?