The Nature of Time

 The 17th century French dramatist, Pierre Corneille, once wrote, "Time is a great master, it orders many things."

Hm. I'm not sure about that. In one sense, time is a human construct - or at least the way we measure it is. It is human beings who have divided each day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. I understand that this obsession with what the exact time is, is a relatively recent human thing - it came in with the Industrial Revolution. Before then, most people rose with the sun and retired to bed when it set. And measured time by the movement of the sun in the sky.

But in another sense, time is beyond all human control. It just is. We move through time at a constant rate and have no ability to pause it, or skip over it. We can only live through it, one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time. And that can be easy, or it can be the hardest thing in the world. Sometimes, something happens which changes our lives forever, and we look back and realise that our world has been divided into Before and After. For Christians, this was the death and resurrection of Jesus. Another, more contemporary example, is the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. For an individual, it might be the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one, or any other "life-changing" event. Before it happened, we were different people to who we are now. 

In that sense, I guess, time is "a great master".  

The way in which season follows season is something else over which we have no control - Spring will follow Winter, then Summer, then Autumn. Although in this age of global warming, the start of each individual season may happen earlier or later than we expect.

Our perceptions of time passing can vary greatly. I'm sure many of us will be familiar of occasions when time has simply "flown by" and others in which it has "crawled". Another sign that we have no control over it. I have posted about this odd flexibility in our perceptions here,  But this at least, is something over which we do have some control - our own perceptions of how time is passing. If we can strive to be aware of each moment as it passes, or at least remember that time passes at a constant rate, we can change our perception of *how* it is passing for us, at that given time. Or so I believe.