Tempus fugit.
Latin for time flies. The expression is used as an explanation of why humans cannot find the time to do all the things they think they need to do. It does not occur to them that, if they put aside the trivial activities, e.g. spending hours on their cell phones or fussing with their lawns in order to make them greener than green, they’d have plenty of time to do the needful things in life, e.g. grocery shopping or voting. It’s just a matter of priorities, don’t you know?
Some of us think that tempus fugits too quickly – a common complaint of the elderly. Others think that tempus fugits too slowly, a common complaint when anticipating an important event, e.g. a wedding or childbirth. Time, like energy, cannot be either created or destroyed, however. It just is, and must be endured as much as possible.
In point of fact, Time does not exist, as we puny humans understand the concept. Time comes into being when two events occur, one after another; the space between the two events is a period of time, and one can assign whatever designation one chooses to that period, whether it is a day” or a “year” or a “whizbang.” Over the millennia that we puny humans have occupied this blue-white marble in space, Time has been divided and subdivided endlessly. Our primitive ancestors measured Time as “seasons”; today, in this Age of Computers, Time is measured in nanoseconds (and this may or may not be the end of the process).
Do you know, dear reader, how parts of time-keeping came to be measured? You can blame the ancient Babylonians for this development. The foundation of their numerical system was the number 12 (as opposed to the metric system of 10). Thus, a “day” consisted of 24 “hours” (12 X 2). Hours contained 60 “minutes,” and minutes contained 60 “seconds” (12 X 5). There are 12 months in a “year.” Originally, a year consisted of 360 “days” (12 X 30) until the ancient astronomers discovered that they had extra “time” their hands when establishing when holy days and special events should take place. They had to adjust accordingly in dealing with a 365-day year, and this adjustment has continued to the present day. (The Mayan calendar is similarly convoluted.)
Tinkering with Time has manifested itself in other ways. For instance, how do we decide what a “day” is ? Geophysically, a day is one complete rotation of the Earth upon its axis. But, because rotation is a continuous process, how do we know when one day ends and another one begins. We don’t know until we create an artificial point on the planet, e.g. the International Date Line in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as the beginning/ending of a “day.”
Furthermore, we currently call this beginning/ending “midnight,” a.k.a. “12 P.M.” which is as meaningless as DST. Our primitive ancestors marked the beginning/ending of a day when the Sun peeked over the eastern horizon. A shameless plug follows. When The Chas wrote the first of his “Legacy of the Wayfarers” novels, a “day” on a human-colonized planet in another part of the Galaxy began/ended at sunrise. It made more sense to do so, because the rotation of this colonized world was much different than the Earth’s rotation.
“Time marches on” is another hoary expression. But we puny humans can get a handle on it if we throw out all of our clocks and calendars and start from scratch with a wholly new, universal system of time-keeping.
Just a thought.