HowTime Passes - May 4 2026

 

How Time Passes

May 4 2026

Odd, how time passes.

Walking the dogs

when I’m lost in reverie,

retreating into my head

as I let them run free.

Driving my usual route

like a milk-horse on its rounds,

when I come to my senses

only to find

I’m already there.

Or lost in words 

in a darkening room

looking down at a screen,

shoulders hunched and neck tightening;

my face a ghostly white

in its catatonic glow.

Only to look up, surprised to see

that the clock on the wall

has leap-frogged ahead,

while I’m left me wondering where

the lost hours went.

How recollection fails,

and I’m out of time

out of place.

I think that falling, time would stretch,

my racing mind concentrate

as it flashes back

imagines ahead;

an entire lifetime lived  . . .

before the sudden stop at the end.

Time is not a ticking clock

or leaky tap

dripping metronomically.

It arrives unexpectedly,

expands and contracts,

and can surreptitiously vanish

in a black hole

of baffled absent-mindedness.

Or hover ominously. 

The roller coaster

has ratcheted jerkily up

to the peak of its rickety curve.

I am poised at the top,

stuck

in a moment of stillness

overlooking the world.

It’s quiet here, high above the fair,

the gears no longer clanking

and the riders all holding their breath.

Then sometimes, it seems

we live impossibly fast.

We are photons

who might, if the path were clear

zap across the universe

at the speed of light.

If “zap” is a suitable word

for 93 billion years.

Photons, travelling for 20 times longer

than the age of the earth,

yet also expiring

at our moment of birth.

A little physics here. I mean the observable universe. The size of the actual universe is unknowable. 

And photons do not “experience” time. Because at the speed of light, according to relativity, time shrinks to nothing. So a photon could cross all 93 billion lightyears of the known universe in an infinitesimal instant. Only to give up its energy when it eventually collides with a planet, an asteroid, or perhaps your retina:  dying at its moment of birth. 93 billion years to us, according to how  we perceive and measure the speed of light; but zero time to the photons it’s made of.

This common experience of blanking out when driving a familiar route — when it feels you must have been on some sort of autopilot — offers a small window of insight into the unconscious brain. We may think conscious experience — awareness, sentient feeling, executive decision making — is the sum of us, and what the brain essentially does. But clearly not here. So what else might be going on below the surface? What do we see, but not perceive — received by the eye, but culled by the unconscious brain? What cognitive biases are percolating up and influencing us unaware? Is the brain on drugs closer to rather than further from its truth?

Lost in words describes the “flow state” I find myself in when reading and — especially — when writing. Athletes also experience this, but more frequently call it “being in the zone”.  Time disappears. Things feel effortless. I once had a space heater on under the table to warm my feet as I wrote.  Only later did I realize that my lower leg had gotten a 2nd degree burn! (Who knows how my pants didn’t catch on fire!)

I’m imagining a traditional wooden roller coaster, peeling paint and all. Not one of those modern gravity-defying tubular steel thrill-rides. The old ones were slower and lower, but somehow felt more perilous.