Personal Time

I’m waiting for a red light to change. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. While I sit behind the wheel, trying to be patient, it occurs to me that I spend an awful lot of my life chilling at stoplights, willing them to turn green.

So I do a very rough calculation: if it takes an average of two minutes for a light-change, and if I average six such events per day, I am spending 4,380 minutes a year sitting at intersections. Divide that by 1,440, the number of minutes in a day, and I am wasting three days of my life — enough for a brief get-away.

This sobering realization led me to think about all the time wasted by commercials that interrupt programs I am watching. And the time uselessly spent standing in lines, even with self-checkout. Or the doctor’s appointment that leaves me sitting in the waiting room — so aptly named — long past the time I should have been seen. Or hanging onto the phone while insipid music plays, supposedly to keep me happy while I wait for a person to talk to me. Happy? Just the opposite.

There must be a way to make good use of time spent in limbo. Daydreaming of course, but beyond that? Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clocks, comes to mind. Is that what I am doing? Dripping away moments of my life?

The whole concept of time is fluid, as Dali seemed to realize. Does it exist? Doesn’t it? A book I’m reading, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, posits that time as a discrete entity does not exist — and this is proven by physics. Complex calculations about the workings of elementary particles can be made without including time as a factor. Does it mean that I am wasting nothing when I’m waiting for a stoplight to change to green? It certainly doesn’t feel that way, but Rovelli says that’s just the way we humans experience what is happening.

Think about it. There is no such thing as the present, because what is happening now for me is different from the now someone else is experiencing in a different place. That means that the past and the future are not universal, but differ from place to place. In effect, our clocks are simply constructs to keep us organized. Most of time, as we experience it, happens by locality.

I can tell that time is variable, because it seems to pass more quickly as I grow older. As a child I felt like Christmas would never come; now I find myself wondering how it already could be time to wrap presents again. The years compress ever faster, a phenomenon described in neuroscience studies. If you are ten years old, a year is one-tenth of your life, so it seems long; if you are eighty, a year is just a little over one percent of your life. Consequently, it feels shorter and continues to do so every year. Further, when you are young, much in your life is new and exciting. As we grow older, things become routine and mundane. We absorb them in less detail, and this makes time seem to pass more quickly.

While much of physics, including Rovelli, considers time to be emergent rather than fundamental, it certainly exists for us humans. We have schedules and deadlines and appointments and birthdays and holidays and clocks. And stoplights to remind us that we feel the flow of time throughout our daily lives.

Jose Luis Borges described time as a river that carries us along. Sometimes it flows too rapidly, other times too slowly. We feel the current and can do nothing to control it. Wasting time seems to be an inherent part of this process. Consequently, I have decided to go with the flow and not worry about temporal shallows that may lie ahead.