Is the passage of time an Ally or an Enemy

What is time, really? How fast is one second? Perhaps we all have a rough sense of its definition, at least in principle. But when we look more closely, time becomes mysterious.

Time is like an ever-flowing river with no clear beginning or end, or so we hope. Some scientists, however, have floated a rather unsettling idea: that we are trapped in a never-ending loop, doomed to relive this life again and again. Why would that be a curse? Because it robs us of novelty, trapping every choice in an endless echo.

Have you heard of time dilation, the notion that time can stretch or compress depending on gravitational pull? In the vast expanse of the cosmos, a single day on Earth might correspond to centuries elsewhere. (At least, that’s what they show in The Orville.)

Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that time is not an external thing at all, but a subjective condition our minds impose on experience. I like to think of time as a series of pockets in spacetime, each a chance for an individual to make an impact that may transcend their own moment.

But do we really choose how we spend our time? Does free will exist? Science suggests our conscious mind directs only about five percent of our actions; the rest is driven by the subconscious. And that subconscious? It’s programmed from childhood, by parents, teachers, peers, and environment. Thoughts simply arise, and we take credit for them. So when do we truly think for ourselves?

After more than twenty years on this planet, I’ve seen what time does to families, societies, friendships, nations, even Earth itself. I recently read that scientists estimate our planet’s “Doomsday” around the year 1,000,002,021. A billion years seems unimaginably distant, yet visionaries like Elon Musk think about humanity’s future now. Are most of us too short-sighted?

A friend once told me, “Time flies, Shadrack, and so should you.” I felt that.

But at the end, as a matter of conscious experience, the reality of life is always now, “this moment…”, the past is a memory, a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated it is also another thought arising now. Let us not spend most of our life forgetting this truth. Find satisfaction in now.