Timely Thoughts

Time. It's on my mind. Yes it is.

People often speak of time as some sort of force and they are not completely wrong. Time flows past. It crawls. It flies. That's because there is 'Time' and 'time'.

The lowercase 'time' is the human perspective of things. It is caught up in the tracking of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and such. It is based on observing specific things and building a structure round about them.

We often think that these numbers are unbreakable and unchangeable. Time marches on, going only forward. Yet so many Americans work through Daylight Savings Time every year, manipulating time without really considering it. The British do something similar. We often assume that all the people of the planet measure time in the same way. This is untrue. The time with a lowercase 't' is simply the manner with which humans measures life so that we can refer to events and how they occurred in an order. 'time' exists so that everything doesn't happen all at once.

'Time' is something that I know exists, that I've been told exists, can feel that it does exist, but I don't understand it at this point. There is a force out there that is Time, that is the progress of the Universe, and it can be wielded.

This is where my head starts to hurt. The concept that Time can be reversed seems ridiculous. We want to believe that we little humans would notice alterations to history but, really, we wouldn't. The flow of the mighty river of Time would immediately redirect itself and, if we were still a part of it, things would be as they had always been to us.

Deja vu, I'm told, is a remnant of a change in Time lingering behind, incompletely erased from our brains.

As much as it may break your brain to consider it, Time may well be altering from moment to moment, heartbeat to heartbeat, history restructuring itself constantly to deal with the alterations being made to it.

It all sounds like heady theory, unprovable at any level, reassuringly unprovable. Yet my friend insists that, not only has he traveled in Time, but that the individual that took him on that trip hinted that he had caused changes in Time. I thought he was crazy until he said the name Matthew Jackson. I know him as well and have seen him act in a way that indicates knowledge of my future.

Stuff like that just makes my stomach hurt.