Perception Of Time

Time. It has passed. There shall be no returning to the moment when I wrote the first word in this article. But can I draw a line through it? Yes, I can. I can also tear off this page and remove all the jagged bit of paper sticking out of the binding meticulously, ensuring that there is no sign left of this page. You would believe it too – this page never existed. In other words, at no given time had I sat down on my table with a cup of tea and two biscuits and wrote a few words on a certain page. Such is one of our perceptions of time. If I did not spend my time writing, I must have done something else. That is another curious aspect of time – we spend it regardless of whether we want to spend it or not. Yet we call it spending. Do we not breathe as involuntarily as the passing of time? We breathe through our idle thoughts yet we attribute time to it and not the more obvious and visible action of breathing. It is also true that if all watches and sources of light were removed from a room the only sense of time would be through our bodily rhythms that we can compare to a simple pendulum, the most fundamental mechanisms of the depiction of time. If we hold our breath we may think that our sense of time is being altered but taking into account our perceptive time scale which is affected by out material senses and the mechanical model of the universe that even our senses are instantly led to believe that it makes no difference. Time may be perceptive and even illusionary but it must also leave an indelible mark on our lives. I may have speculated upon tearing off this page to deceive time. But I had not considered one aspect of the notebook. Newton’s Third Law dictates that every action must have a reaction – the number of pages in the notebook has changed. Either material or spiritual, time leaves a mark upon us all.

This encourages me to place a finger in the massive, placid and infinitely deep lake of thought. Forthrightly stating, it is extremely rare for two persons to think in exactly the same way as the other regarding everything. Our thoughts simply “coincide” with another human being. In physics, we call it constructive interference. Our brains constantly emit electromagnetic waves. Light is a spectrum in the electromagnetic wave. Through experiments it has been shown that two light sources placed close to each other create an interference pattern – a series of bright and dark bands. The bright bands signify constructive interference, that is, agreement. The dark bands depict destructive interference, that is, disagreement. Our scale of attraction to a person depends on these bands. Sure, I am expressing relations as the best friend or the lover as a mere band on a screen but that is how we connect if we just walk on a basic level. Although, in real life, there is a lot more than just interference at play at both our brain interaction and light as we see around us. The objects and people we come across and the way they affect us also have an impact on our perception of time. We keep searching for happiness, calm and peace. Situations that involve us using all our faculties at once are called stressful. If something keeps on persisting we might even become bogged down. Have you ever run a really heavy game on your computer? It gets so hot that it shuts down. In the same way, all of us have our capacities and like a computer needs a cooling fan, we need friends. It is not possible for a human to be in his best spirits at all times. Time consumes us all whether we are happy or sad and in my opinion, the factor that decides whether it is being consumed while waiting in traffic or hovering in a make believe world, is upon his surroundings and himself. Let us not go around telling an already stressed human to go around play in his own backyard. Time has ensured that his playing in his own backyard is as involuntary and ineffective as breathing.

If thoughts are important then my next question is very simple – can time be slowed or quickened by thought? Of course not; we must certainly be jesting in drunken merriment. Hold that thought. I will bring forth an old observation. Time seems to pass faster when we are doing something we love but it passes excruciatingly slowly when we are engaged in what we truly dislike or have no interest in. In fiction you must have read how time seems to be in a standstill when all hope is lost, darkness has enveloped the light and the season of perpetual darkness makes it seem as if we all are in a cavern of hopeless existence for eternity. Well, not true. In all those moments we forgot a crucial ticking of time that depicts our eternal mortality – the heartbeat. If we observe, our heartbeat is roughly at a rate of one beat per second. We have built our instruments to measure time but the real clock, our entire perception of time and our very existence is at that faint dub-dub of the heart that we can listen to if everything around us ceases to exist. That is the ultimate ticking of the inevitability of life. Our heart keeps beating regardless of all circumstances and by each beat it gets older just as the parts of an internal combustion engine are deteriorated by that negligible amount after each explosion. This understanding of time is more final than everything else in our lives. Do I still tear this page off and pretend it did not exist? The heartbeats that passed as I examined that thought have just passed and nothing can hide that evidence. Thus it is with this grim realization that eternal youth is just a mental state and that the end of time is indeed real, let us make the most of the time we have. Being jovial is good but we must also pay attention to the melancholy of existence because it has some words to say too: the perception of time is the dawning of the beginning and the end.