You Got to Do the Time

The greatest illusion of all time is time. When you consider the role it plays in our lives, dictating when we eat, sleep, work and play, you would think that nothing could be more reliable. To the contrary, Einstein's theory of the Fourth Dimension tells us that all time exists simultaneously, and it is a function of our mind created to prevent everything from happening at once.

The past and the future exist in the space-time continuum. Our brain is a filter, revealing events in sequence and experiencing each moment like a steppingstone.

Another insight from Einstein is that time is relative to the speed at which we are moving. Dilation of time speculates that if you leave earth and travel at the speed of light, when you return, you will be significantly younger than your earth-bound peers who traveled more slowly. Gravity can also bend time, especially around black holes in space.

We most likely will not travel in space, or encounter a black hole, but we can experience other types of relativity. Water will boil in a standard size saucepan in ten minutes, but the same pot, if watched, we are told will seemingly take forever. We also have relativity in cultural time, like the New York minute, which causes me to do everything faster than my southern or midwestern friends.

If time were absolute, there would be no such thing as Daylight Savings, whereby we move our clocks forward or back to chase the natural sunlight. It's a social convention that began during World War I in Germany and was adopted by other countries to increase productivity.

The United States experimented with making Daylight Savings the permanent time when we had an energy crisis and needed to expand waking hours with more sunlight. It was unpopular and we reverted to turning clocks ahead in the spring and back in the fall.

Hawaii, Arizona and U.S. territories remain in standard time year-round. When I need to reset clocks on appliances and in my car, I envy standard time. These artificial changes disrupt our circadian rhythm, especially when we are on the losing-an-hour cycle. There is a renewed movement called the Sunshine Protection Act to make Daylight Savings permanent. I'll adjust to whatever social agreement we make.  

The Egyptians invented the sundial some 3,500 years ago because of the need for a convention of time, but it wasn't convenient on cloudy days. Ironically, our digital time comes to us from a computer cloud.

When we were in the analog age, we were satisfied to know the time rounded to the nearest five minutes. All the clocks in my house that are set by hand are out of sync by a minute or two, while our digital clocks are synchronized by signals beamed from satellites.

Out of sentimentality, I hold onto that analog clock, with the ornate hour and minute hands, that never tells the exact time. Scientists are working on the next level atomic clock on a microchip, but it won't replace my decorative wall clock.

When railroads became the dominant means of transportation in the 1800s, standard railroad time was adopted. As travel took to the skies, air traffic controllers began using 24-hour military time instead of a.m. and p.m. to avoid confusion. There has been a recent spate of near misses on airport runways, including one the day after I landed at one of these airports, so human error still challenges our most accurate systems.

The time discussion becomes further complicated with time zones changing as you move east or west and an International Date Line that allows you to time travel by crossing into the next day or yesterday, messing with our calendars.

Calendars are another imperfect convention. There are solar calendars based on the earth's rotation around the sun, like the Gregorian calendar used by much of the western world, and lunar ones based on the phases of the moon, like the Chinese developed.

The Gregorian calendar requires an extra day every four years when we have a leap day to balance it. The Chinese calendar adds a month every three years to catch up with the eleven days it loses annually. The Hebrew calendar is luni-solar with a correction every three years and a 19-year cycle. While the secular world agrees that the current year is 2023, the Hebrew calendar is in the year 5783.

Nature has its own way of keeping time. Animals navigate the seasons by migrating to warmth in temperate climates and to rain in semi-tropical zones. Seasons are reversed depending on whether you are north or south of the Equator.

Monarch Butterflies migrate 3,000 miles, sometimes traveling 100 miles per day, to over-winter in the warm climate of Mexico. Then they flutter to Texas to lay the eggs of the next generation before they die. A new generation flies north in the summer months. These beautiful creatures know instinctually when to travel to a thriving supply of milkweed, without a calendar.  

I would be remiss not to mention the Doomsday Clock that currently places us ninety seconds from a hypothetical global catastrophe at midnight, the metaphoric end of all time. Initiated in 1947, by a consortium of Atomic Scientists, the clock is adjusted each year to reflect mankind's risk of annihilation by politics, energy, weapons and climate changes. Let's hope for a reset before the stroke of midnight.  

We must accept the structure of time that our brains and society demand. When doctors examine the mental capacity of patients, they check their orientation using a Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) that begins with questions about the day, date, month, year and season.

If I find my cognitive abilities being tested by this means, would I not be justified to object based upon the imperfection and sheer fiction of the concept of time? This approach would likely backfire because, like the judge says, "You got to do the time." It's a necessary part of our human existence and our societal contract.       

Linda Goor Nanos is a practicing attorney, author, wife, mother and grandmother. Her writing credits include a memoir "Forty Years of PMS," professional articles and published essays on life lessons. Read More