Time: The history of tomorrow August 6, 2019 – Posted in: time management – Tags: history, past, the past, Time
Ask any scientist, they’ll tell you that time doesn’t really exist as an objective reality.
In a manner of speaking, the past and the future are only abstract ideas as the present moment is the only thing we can ever truely observe and experience.
The future seems unwritten and influenceable and the past seems highly subjective to the individual’s experience.
Time is a concept for our minds to make sense of all the happenings, changes, and cycles all around us and the universe.
But the incomprehensible fact remains that the past and the future all come from some present moment that is experienced ”live” only once.
The only thing that really makes the past, present, and future different is our subjective ”present” experience to them.
It’s in this way that the past, present, and future are just different parts of the same tableau. Our paint brush is held in the present as a tool we that we hold for very short instance it seems.
With each stroke of our brush, we change what is possible for the future and what is factual for the past.
Time is also man-made construct to help us make things happen in the physical world in space. For example, if I want to come into contact with you, we need to agree two very important conditions for this to happen. Time and a place. When and where.
The history of tomorrow
Time seems to be in some way a measurement of some infinite concept. It can seem subjective at times to our experience as we’ve all had hours that seem to pass by in minutes, or minutes that seem to take hours.
It’s in this way that duration is just a concept without a systematic way of measuring it. Since time is an infinite concept, it can’t actually be made sense of in a real quantifiable way without subjecting it to our limited understanding.
As our mortality seems to dictate our subjective experience of time, I think we can say that time is mostly used as a tool for us to measure life process. If we experienced time as an immortal, what would be our relation to it?
We say that one day is one earth rotation, that one year is one trip around the sun, and if we are very lucky, we may get to live 100 of these.
What does time mean to the human condition?
Although every moment of our life will simply be a past event in the not so distant future, we’re blessed with the conscious ability to exercise power over time in that we understand that the things we do today can change the future forever(the future past).
It’s our awareness of the fact that we can change the future with our present decisions that seems to set us apart from the other life on earth. With one decision today, our brush leaves its final stroke on the tableau of time and prepares the colors with which the future may hold.
We can also be strategic with time in understanding the present. At the present moment, I have multiple choices to make which will change the tableau of time forever.
Let’s say I have two choices. I can punch you in the face or I can send you a gift. Each of these actions will most likely drastically change things for the past and future.
At a larger and more strategic level, we can build our actions one upon the other to forever change the tableau. We can think of setting a set of deadlines to make bigger actions happen sooner than they naturally would happen. It’s in this way that deadlines are like special ops against time.
In the 1860s, a ‘dead line’ was a line within or around a prison. Prisoners would be shot for crossing the ‘dead line’.
Today it means you cross the line of tomorrow doing something that wouldn’t have otherwise naturally happened without a planned set of actions
A deadline is just getting something done faster within the span of our life which means that we can obtain some important result before another important happening can take place thereby giving us a step up and strategic advantage that we previously lacked before these actions were coordinated.
We need to leverage our power on certain happenings by putting ourselves in a advantageous position before unstoppable events take place which would compromise our leverage on events that we seek to influence.
Time only means something in that events here happen according to the same laws as something there and that we are mortal and we want to do anything at all.