This essay was first published in the 2020 edition of Voices and uses MLA documentation.

A FEELING OF EXCITEMENT IS in the air as the clock hanging by the whiteboard in the front of the room ticks down second by second. Only six and a half minutes left. I eye around the room, checking on my friend sitting four rows away from me because his last name starts with “A” and mine starts with “B.” He rolls his eyes, clearly just as bored as I am. Our tests lay neatly face down in the corner of our desks, neat not because my friend and I are inherently tidy, but because there’s nothing else to do for the cursed thirty minutes after we bubble in our last answers except to straighten our tables and look up at the clock. Five minutes, forty-seven seconds. Forty-six, forty-five, forty-four, forty-three, forty-two…

—

Time. Time. Time time, time time. Time time time. Time… time. Congratulations, you just took five seconds to read the word “time” eleven times. Those are five precious seconds you’ll never get back, and you just handed them to me because of some external mandate to read this paper. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia—these are all units of this funny thing called time. Well duh, you might be thinking, where on earth could this be going? The concept of time is so innate in humans that it defies definition, its meaning so base it doesn’t even necessitate description. The Oxford English Dictionary defines time as “a finite extent or stretch of continued existence,” but that’s not what time really means at all (“Time,” def. 1.a). “Time” means pressing the add-thirty-seconds-button four times while microwaving a Hot Pocket. Time means the 47-minute commute through bumper-to-bumper city traffic you make every morning. Time means the excruciating 365 days between your fifth Christmas and your sixth Christmas. Time is time is time. Why box in something with words that is so innately fluid?

Units of time are measured by observable things in nature. One year is measured by one orbit of the Earth around the sun. One day is measured by one complete rotation of the Earth about its axis. One second is measured by the decay of a cesium atom, more or less, but why do we bother to measure these things at all (“Unite of Time”)? The reason is this: although we know that 60 seconds makes a minute, 60 minutes makes an hour, and 24 hours makes a day, time is terribly subjective. Two people sitting in the same lecture hall can feel time flowing in radically different ways. For one person, minutes can pass like hours; for the other, the hours pass by in seconds. Thus, we need some sort of objective metric to measure the passage of events. The idea to measure time in minutes and seconds has been around since the days of the city of Babylon, more than five-thousand years ago, and yet it’s difficult to comprehend functioning without minutes and seconds (Andrews).

Life in three dimensions is terribly boring. It’s only the fourth that makes life worth living at all, really, because without time, there can be no change. Without change, there can be no growth, there can be no happiness, there can be no sadness, joy, experience, sensation, ambition, direction. Without time, there can be no change. Without change, there can be no life. That’s really why we bother with this concept of “time” at all, because of the inevitable change it accompanies. We don’t care why it’s two minutes in the microwave to cook a Hot Pocket; we just know that any shorter will produce a soggy and frozen waste, and too much longer will set off the smoke alarm.

—

My friend Weston and I are in a unique situation. To our backs lies a sheer cliff face that we’ve only just managed to precariously tumble down. In front of us lies even taller cliffs with edges deceptively close to where we’re standing. I’ve only just managed to avoid falling off one of them by grabbing onto an exposed tree root during a rock slide. Beyond the cliff edges sits the objective of our expedition: an impossibly beautiful green. Beautiful because it’s complemented by the dull grays and reds of the rock faces, shielding it from outside observers, and impossible because the plant life we see doesn’t normally thrive at 13,000 feet above sea level. The lifeblood of the garden—a centuries old glacier—sits adamant in the middle of the clearing, tiny streams stemming from its base and racing to the lake below. It’s a scene like out of a movie. Looking up, the towering Longs Peak casts a chilly shadow over Chasm Lake.

Weston and I begin our descent down the tall, red cliffs. We’re the first to take this trail down the mountain, of that I’m absolutely positive. It’s far out of the way, in addition to being dangerous. A fall from as high as we’re standing will certainly kill us. A half hour passes. Two. Weston and I are finally on solid footing, scooping fresh glacial water right into our thirsty mouths.

I finally take the time to sit and look. The mountain glade is silent, save for the quiet whispers of the streams below us. There are no footprints. There are no white caps from Aquafina bottles casually discarded on the grassy floor. If it were nighttime, I imagine I could look up and see the stars with absolute clarity. The meadow by Chasm Lake stands apart from time, unchanging. The scene I see before me is the same someone hundreds of years earlier could’ve seen. The meadow is so ancient and yet so young. Weston taps me on the shoulder. Despite my wish to stay and enjoy the scenery, we’ve got to move on.

—

There is a feeling nearly everyone has felt—the feeling that time is slowing or moving in slow motion. Perhaps time slowed down seconds before a car crash or after a biopsy came back with terminal results. How can an objective metric, like time, slow down? Actually, time isn’t slowing down at all. Neither is the brain speeding up. The sensation of time slowing is an illusion in the brain caused by a surge of adrenaline to the amygdala. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston ran an interesting experiment “[t]o see if danger makes people experience time in slow motion” (Choi). In the experiment, participants were dropped from great heights while harnessed to ropes. When later surveyed, participants gave estimates of their fall time. The estimated fall times participants suggested were about three times longer than their actual fall times. In order to see if time for these participants was actually “slowing down,” they harnessed displays with the jumpers. These displays would show sets of certain numbers that would change in increasingly short intervals. If perception really increased during moments of danger, scientists postulated, then falling participants would be able to read blinking numbers that were unreadable under normal circumstances. The scientists found that during the fall, participants could discern the numbers no better than if they were on the ground. Thus, they concluded that time does not actually slow down during emergencies. So why do we feel like it does?

Many theories circulate on the subject. The most prominent in the study is that when a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain. (Choi)

In this way, a person thinks they experienced slow motion because they distinctly remember more of an event.

—

The day is November 23, 2014. It’s the first Sunday of Thanksgiving break. It’s my freshman year of high school. It hasn’t snowed yet, but the air outside is cold and crisp, the kind of air that freezes your lungs as you breathe in. Three hours of church are finally over. I run up to my room, already releasing my tie from my neck as I bound up the stairs two at a time. My suit comes off, and then I’m sprawled in bed. This is peace. No homework, no stress. Outside my window, I hear the honking of geese flying south. There is no noise but my breathing and the sound of nature just outside my room. And crying. Crying? Sobbing more like. Normally, I’d be irritated by the noise, but this time it brings me pause. I crack open my door and peer into the hallway. My mom sits on the stairs, sobbing. I’m not sure why, and she can’t tell me either as I try to console her. She’s entirely choked up.

Five years later I remember with distinction the moments that followed. The soft carpet suddenly becomes coarse under my feet; the noise of the geese filters out of my observation. Five seconds feel like five minutes. My mom clears her throat and delivers the terrible news. It hits me with a dull thud in my chest, stopping my next heartbeat. On November 23, 2014, my friend died by suicide.

—

The universe contains a few inevitabilities, which is why they are so remarkable. The first: nothing can stop the flow of time. The second: everyone who lives must one day die. Both seem so intuitive, and yet, the violation of these certainties remains the subjects of our deepest fantasies. What if? we all wonder. What if we could bring back the dead? wondered Mary Shelley. What if we could travel through time? thought H. G. Wells.

Some are so uncomfortable with these inevitabilities that they develop chronophobia, or, the fear of the passage of time. This fear is most common among the elderly and the incarcerated and manifests itself through intense anxiety, a feeling of claustrophobia, excessive rumination, and even depression (Fritscher and Gans). As people close to death realize their own mortality, time becomes the enemy. They fear that time has slipped through their fingers.

Odd perceptions of time aren’t abnormal, though. They’re quite common, actually. As a person grows older, time seems to go by faster, like it’s continually speeding up. Children have a slower perception of time relative to adults, which leads to questions like, “Are we theeeeere yet?” and, “How many more days until my birthday?” Why do kids seem to feel time slower than adults? Steve Taylor, Ph.D., explores two theories: the theory of proportional time and the theory of perceptual time.

Proportional time theory asserts that a person’s experience of time is relative to the years that person has lived. Each person experiences a year as relative to their life as a whole (Taylor). Therefore, a ten-year-old experiences a year as 1/10 of their life, or 10% of their total existence, whereas a sixty-year-old experiences a year as 1/60 of their life, or 1.6% of their total existence. This theory explains the familiar feeling that “time is slipping away.” Perceptual time theory asserts that the speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process—the more information there is, the slower time goes[.]….[P]erhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of ‘perceptual information’ that they take in from the world around them. (Taylor)

—

The following week is full of candlelight vigils, memorial services, talks behind closed doors (“why do you think he did it?”), and the rest of the terrible discomfort that comes with losing someone. I’m personally despondent, unwilling to discuss what’s happened. My mind races in overdrive. What were my last words to him? Is there anything I could’ve done? I’m stuck in the present, desperately wishing I had a time machine to last week. The ruminations in my head are almost debilitating. If I could just go back, if I could only go back…

If I could go back to the 22nd of November, I’d get in my car and drive to his house. I’d say “hi” to his family. I’d ask where he is; maybe I’d go visit him in his room. I’d beg him to reconsider. But I can’t. I don’t have a time machine. Time is a river, and nobody can swim upstream.

—

I’m almost five years from that cold day in November. I can’t believe it was that long ago. I remember feeling a similar feeling on the one-year anniversary. The two-year, the three-year. The four-year that was just a few months ago. Each passing year is accompanied by the same disbelief and the same dream: I wish I could go back.

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is accepting change. Nothing is the same as it was yesterday, and everything will be different tomorrow. Time will move on with or without you if you sit still long enough. Although it can seem an insurmountable task at times, we all must get up and leave the meadow.

Works Cited

Andrews, Kylie. “Why Are There 24 Hours in a Day?” ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 15 Nov. 2011, www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.htm.

Choi, Charles Q. “Why Time Seems to Slow Down in Emergencies.” LiveScience, Purch, 11 Dec. 2007, www.livescience.com/2117-time-slow-emergencies.html.

Fritscher, Lisa, and Steven Gans. “Chronophobia Can Happen When Time Seems to Pass Too Quickly.” Verywell Mind, Dotdash, 16 June 2018, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-fear-of-time-2671776.

Taylor, Steve. “Why Does Time Seem to Pass at Different Speeds?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 3 July 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201107/why-does-time-seem-pass-different-speeds.

“Time, n., Int., and Conj.” Ether, n.: Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/view/Entry/202100?rskey=eIbzkE&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid.

“Unit of Time (Second).” Essentials of the SI: Introduction, physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/second.html.