Order of time

October 27th

There is nothing more orderly and organized than time. Always neatly divided into seconds and minutes and hours and days and so on. Always easily divided or multiplied by 12 and 24 and 60. Each length is always the same, no matter on which clock or cell phone or in which city or country. Always on, since the physical form of our universe came into being, and always going at the same pace toward another number on the face of the clock or on a page of a calendar. Exactly the same as it ever was, and exactly the same for everyone.

And yet — so personal. My time started when I was born and will last until my last breath. And it is only mine and deeply mysterious at that since I don't know how much of it I have left. I cannot share it or explain it or make another person understands it. And since I haven't experienced time before I was born, I can say that there was no time before that. That time belonged to other people, it was experienced by them, and I don't necessarily believe in it since I wasn't there.

Belong is the wrong word, I think. Time doesn't belong to us. Time just goes on, without missing the flow. I wanted to say — without missing the beat — but that would be wrong as well, it was only us who assigned specific timing measures to divide time into manageable chunks. Seconds and minutes are marked by beats of mechanical devices, time only flows. Well, we could measure the time by our heartbeats, but we wouldn't know what to measure it against — there would be no reference point.

And it would be mostly false as well — how to compare the heartbeat of people in love to the heartbeat of a person resting after the drudgery of a day. Or how the heartbeat of a person full of hope is different from the heartbeat of a person who lost all the hope already — and what if that is the same person, only at different points of time flow? I wish it would be possible to spend one day, only one day from sunrise to the next sunrise, without any time measuring devices. Without being reminded about the exact time at a given moment. Just one day when time keeps on flowing, but only in the background. When shackles of clocks and cell phones and computers and appointments and time cards and planned meals no longer are a constraint. Just one day.