Time

Some people say that time doesn’t exist. For those of us who have spent our lives by the clock, this can sound absurd. Well, let’s look at this thing we call time.

Have you ever noticed that when you wake up, it doesn’t seem as though time elapsed since you fell asleep? Or that when you’re engrossed in something, time seems to “fly”? Or that when you remember an event from long ago, it “seems like yesterday”? Where did time go? Can anything that is real just disappear?

We perceive time as a mental construct that represents the distance between events. For example, if we’re waiting impatiently for a bus or for a line of people ahead of us to move, we perceive time. The more we want a future event to occur, the longer time seems to “drag”. But, as described in the previous paragraph, on many occasions we perceive no time at all. So is time real? It seems that time depends solely on our perceptions, i.e., it has no reality of its own.