I had a dream that I dreamed a dream; how awful. I woke up next Wednesday, or maybe it was last Tuesday, or is it today? Sometimes existence feels like one long afternoon, doesn’t it? It’s like a bad day you’ve had your whole life. No—it is time… to wake up. Time to finish those assignments, time to begin those very same assignments, and time to wish for more time. The time I refer to is, of course, the one that has a charmingly abusive way of trapping us, freeing us, enslaving us, and letting us go, but where does one rotation end and the next begin?
What is time? “What a silly question,” some would reply. It’s the thing we spend, the thing we save, the thing we earn, and so on. Open your wallet; can you spare any time? Funny, that doesn’t make sense, does it? Yet, somehow, most of us divide our days, our school schedules, and our lives into this time commodity that we can never quite afford. But why do we wish to buy time when we already own it? Time is yours; it cannot be bought or sold. If it could, why isn’t it in your wallet?
Let us make use of chronemics, the study of time in communication. Can either monochronic (M) time, or polychronic (P) time help us understand what time is? I’m afraid we don’t have time to explore that question.
When we begin to feel overwhelmed about our time’s crippling debt, when we wish to cross over from this moment and arrive at the next, when we can finally enjoy that next moment, what are we stepping over?
As Saint Augustine put it, “What… is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it… I do not know.”
When time isn’t ours, the afternoons just keep going. It makes you contemplate either taking a nap or having another cup of coffee; a nap, of course, being the kind of sleep that you never want to wake up from—the kind that frees you from having to dream about dreams—and coffee being a giant cup of nihilistic existentialism. Whoever once said that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger forgot to add the caveat: “although only if it doesn’t leave you for dead—beyond possible repair.” It’s funny how that last part is fairly important, isn’t it? I suppose they never had the time to finish that.
Shall we count to 10? What will happen when we reach 11? And how long will it take us to get there?