A reflection on time as an inexorable flow that affects and shapes all our lives.
Time is a quantity used by all of us. We live by time and cannot exist without it. It controls us, and we must obey it. Why? Because it flows relentlessly and cannot be stopped, sped up, or slowed down. It continues at its own pace regardless of whether we have completed our tasks or achieved our plans. Everyone mentions time daily, whether scheduling meetings, deciding when to have lunch, or checking TV schedules to see when a show starts. Time has always been, is, and will be. But what is time really?
We may assume that time originated during, or even before, the Big Bang, when galaxies, stars, planets, and other cosmic structures began to form. Perhaps it did not originate at all — perhaps it has always existed and together with energy created the universe. All celestial bodies began to move and rotate, and time took on its visual form. Why do planets rotate? Why do stars burn? Why do meteors fly through space? Because time flows. Imagine time stopping. What would happen? Planets would freeze, stars would likely die out, meteors would remain suspended…
In human terms, however, time is something slightly different. When people say 'time,' they imagine ticking clocks, day and night, work, school, appointments, free time, and many other things. We perceive time as a structure of our daily life. At 6:30 in the morning our alarm rings, we get up, follow a fixed routine, spend a certain amount of time on hygiene, breakfast, getting dressed, and preparing for school or work, which usually starts at eight. We count minutes until breaks and lunch. School or work ends, we go home, in the evening we go out or have dinner, at 7:30 we turn on the TV and watch the news, then complain about a few minutes delay of a movie, go to bed, and the alarm rings again — and the day repeats. A day is one unit of time we live by. A day is one rotation of Earth around its axis, divided into hours, minutes, and seconds. A year is one orbit of Earth around the Sun, divided into months, weeks, and days. That is how we have defined it and how we live every day — under this system so there is no chaos and we can do what we need to do at specific times. But no matter how we define these values, the planet will rotate at the same speed, because time does not change for us. Time is our master and our life. We live, age, and die because of time. It cannot be controlled, seen, felt, or heard, yet we know it exists because we perceive it everywhere — in ticking clocks or rising and setting sun. If it stopped existing, your eyes would stop on this sentence and never finish reading it.