Meaning of Time

Its 5:45am in the morning by my alarm clock, I have made 3 attempts to try and my myself into snooze mode to no avail. I have nothing to do but stare at the watch in front of me. And while just staring at the watch it occurred to me how slow time moves. Here’s an exercise for you! just try staring at a watch for 5 minutes, its only when you stare at the watch with a thoughtless mind do you realize that time is never running out on you and its you that’s running out on time. Time is an unstoppable force (please leave out the pseudo-theory of relativity now), no matter what you do or who you are time is always going to win. Everything is a slave time, and by everything I mean all living and non-living objects, even the stars we see are slaves of time, Time takes no prisoners and everything right from tiny ants to galaxies are like footprints on the shores of time, some higher up on the shores and the others in the path of the next on-coming wave.

This reminds me of a short story I once read about two children playing on the seashore building and destroying castles of sand, the irony however was the children themselves represent the sand castles on the shores of nature and how life has this never ending urge to move to an end, taking it a step further nature itself is like a raindrop that has left the cloud which bore it and is waiting to hit the ground below to loose its existence and identity guarded only by time. This thought led me to a larger question if everything including us are bounded by time which in itself has no end, how can one quantify time? Some how the units like years, months…..seconds seem very relative and artificial. Thus, making time (as we know it) a pseudo unit of measurement based only on the human percept.

It makes me wonder how a person’s percept of time changes according to the situation. For all those of you who have ever had a chance to make a presentation would realize the difference in the percept of time. While you are up there on the stage blabbering away to glory time flies away, One never realizes how long it has been since he/she took the stage, I have had my goof ups of overshooting my time limit in a presentation, while on the other hand it’s a so difficult to even stay focused (in my case awake) when someone (like profs) else is talking and you have to listen, every minute seems like ten and an hour seems like a day (remember the exponential graph hehe). If we think hard we all will realize that time will catch up with you and the only way to live like a happy life is to leave no room for the element of time in the journey of life and let time take its toll the way it does. My thoughts can be captured very well by a verse of Pink Floyd’s song Time.

“And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”

OK now I think I better sleep or else the exponential graph of time will get extremely steep in tomorrows classes.