Silver tops still wandering

We are governed by time. Never was this more apparent than when you find yourself determining how long you think you need to make your next connection to your next train.

Having just read ‘Sapiens’ a Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Haran I got to thinking about ‘time’ and have been left wondering what it really is. My insticts tell me it is pobably subjective in all of its’ guises, but then maybe not. My dictionaries and Theasaurus advise that the word is both a verb and a noun depending on context. So then I decided to list all of the words I could think of where ‘time’ appears as either a prefix or suffix and the phrases it pops up in. I filled a couple of pages of my exercise book and realised I was muddling my head up with my musings.

It seems that defining ‘time’ in a way that makes it applicable to all fields and diversities which need to incorporate the notion of time into their respective measuring systems within each and every discipline has eluded scholars for millenea. Not a chance for me then!

At least I can postulate now, no pressure, there is no answer. Some say time is a dimension, in which events occur sequentially. The philosopher Kant presents the notion that time is neither an event or a thing and so cannot be measured. I have a bit of bother with that representation. It leaves me wondering how he ever knew when to eat, sleep, concentrate on his writings or attend meetings and teachings, and whether people he was supposed to meet with were constantly either kept waiting or stood up. He could have lived his academic life as a ‘no show’. I haven’t studied philosophy…yet! So will not offer an opinion.

In current ‘times’ (there you go), we in our world take time very much for granted, in all its’ guises. ‘Just in time’, ‘almost time’, ‘my time’, ‘anytime’, ‘sometime’, ‘goodtime’, ‘dark times’, ‘bed time’ ‘summertime’, ‘time to kill’, ‘time wasting’, ‘time will tell’, ‘it’s about time’. Or, history defined as ‘times’ recounted, re-told, corrupted, manipulated and manoeuvered through, yes you guessed it, ‘time’.

There does seem to be a tenuous thread running through the various ‘big thinkers’ when they have attempted to define time. That there is a past, a present and a future. This may well equate to, as Augustine ( ancient philosopher and theologian 354AD – 430AD ) suggested all that time ago, to memory as past, attention in the present and expectation as the future. This is very much  the foundation most of the worlds population live by today.

Whatever your perceptions of time in all its mysterious facades, I wish you the very ‘best of times’. Remembering a ditty I once read about ‘the present’ being just that … a present. Live it, love it, treasure it.