12 | The Time has Come to Talk About Time

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a Co-Finder of the Table Collective.

The time has come, to talk about time.

If you have been following along, you know that in reflecting on the question from Episode 2, “where and when did I begin”, I have come to understand that everything is entangled, physically and psychically, and that just as each thing is connected to every other thing, so too, every place is connected to all other places and thus, every “where” is connected to every other “where.” 

Which means that I could truthfully answer the original question about “where and when did I begin”, by saying, “I began nowhere and everywhere!”

Now obviously I don’t typically tell people, “nowhere” if someone asks me where I was born! In addition to not wanting to be a strange, eccentric oddity, there are practical reasons for responding in conventional, expected ways. By practical I mean, that our conventional ways of talking about such things are part of how our world operates. Something needs to be included when filling out forms that ask us for a place of birth, after all. 

But, even apart from that, I believe there are certain places where I am more entangled than others, where collections of the particles entangled with the whole cosmos are more entangled with me than those entangled in other locations, maybe. So, although I may know intellectually that Arcadia is not just Arcadia and that Bakersfield is not just Bakersfield, and that they are made up of all sorts of particles from other places, affected by generations of people, etcetera, my memories and emotions are so powerfully wrapped up in those particular collections of cosmically connected elements and people, that it makes profound sense to say that “I was born in Arcadia and raised in Bakersfield.”

Now it is time to talk about time. What about when I was born? 

 

When is When?

My official forms of ID all give my birthdate, with a year, a month, a day, and if my mother were here, she could tell you the hour and the minute. But my experience in preparing the last 11 Episodes has only heightened my hunch that the nature of time would be more mysterious than what we mean when we say March 5, 1958, at 2 minutes past 3 a.m. (I made up the time, by the way). 

My experience also tells me that the nature of time is likely to be counter-intuitive and is unlikely to match neatly with the way we experience time in the course of life.

So, in order to prepare, to orient myself and ourselves, as it were, to pay attention to time, I will invite us here to pause and give ourselves to the present moment (suspending judgement for now about what “present” and “moment” might mean). I invite us to do this as fully as possible, and in doing so to allow ourselves to be aware of how slippery time is, and how mysterious our experience of it is.

This poem, Eyes Open, was the result of my own experience during an extended meditation in which I was seeking to just be present in and to “the moment.”

 

Eyes Open

My eyes open, close, open, close

A million moments upon moments

Eyes open, eyes close

Another million blinking moments blind absent gone

Eyes open, eyes close

A world is passing unseen untouched unlived

Eyes open, eyes close

 

Eyes open

 

Eyes open

Unblinking burning begging to close

Open

Drying moistening watering spilling

Open

Seeing awake alive

Open

 

The single moment between gone

And not yet come

Open

Simply fully merely here

 

Eyes open

 

The experience I seek to capture in that poem, and the experience I have every time I re-read it even now, is an experience of the elusiveness of time. Experientially elusive, cognitively mysterious.

What is time?

 

What is Time?

We plan our lives using time. We can’t function practically without some agreed way of using time. Everyone knows what time is, right?

Augustine of Hippo, an influential Christian thinker who died in the 5th century CE, speaking about time said in effect, “I know what it is until I am asked what it is.” 

Try it. Take a moment and define it in your own mind.

We talk about time, and we experience time. But do we know time?

We talk about time

We are very accustomed to think and speak of time, and to use time. It is something that can be measured, it helps us to sequence events, it can be used to compare the duration of events, it allows us to speak of the gaps between events. These conventional uses of time are what enables us to keep track of athletic feats and records (the 4 minute mile), or agree on dinner plans (15 minutes past 6), or know how much to pay a part time employee for a month’s work (37 hours).

We experience time

Perhaps the most common way of describing our experience of time, the way that I assume most of my listeners experience time, is as some form of a continuous progression, a series of irreversible experiences; experiences which include both external actions and events, and internal cognitive and emotional “events.” We most commonly experience existence as a constant, changing, flow of events from the past into the future. And the present moment is that always elusive dividing point between them.

We talk about time and we experience time. 

But do we know time?

We talk about time and experience time without ever thinking about what time is. Does it exist as an objective, material reality? Does the way we think about time and talk about time come about as a result of what we experience as conscious beings? Is time, I might ask, just a habit, a way of living and speaking that we have come to share? 

 

My Approach 

I am going to approach my questions about the nature of time through three large frames of reference: Pragmatics, Physics, and Philosophy (the latter of which will feature ways of understanding time in the great religious heritages).

In this Episode, after outlining some of the big questions about the nature of time, I will focus on the pragmatics, the practical ways we use and understand time. Future Episodes will explore time through the frames of reference of Physics and Philosophy. There may be a concluding Episode for the conversations about time. However, my experience thus far with the podcast suggests I may find myself changing this plan, if I can call it that, as I go. So I hesitate to be too detailed in my predictions here!

Here are some of the questions I have as I try to understand time:

• Is time the same everywhere, and the same in its relationship to everything? In other words, is time the same, dare I say it, all the time? 
• Does time pass, or move, or is that just the way we experience it? Is it more accurate to say that we pass and move through time?
• Does time only go in one direction? Or, do we only go in one direction?
• Do times other than the present moment exist? Is “this present moment” the only real time? Does only now actually exist? Do the past and the future have any existence?
• About what we call the present: how long or short does a point in time need to be to qualify as a present moment? One second? A nano-second?
• Does the present moment ever exist? Is there really a “now?”

 

Much of the above is difficult to talk about without talking about questions related to how we experience time, and whether our experiences of it are accurate in relationship to what it “is.” So, a few other questions:

• Does time exist independently of a mind that perceives it? If time and our perception of it are tied together, then is time also a part of what I refer to as psychic entanglement?
• What is the relationship between time and the sense of identity a sentient being has as they experience the passage of time? Is a person, in other words, the same person at different times? Is this “me” who is aware of a past, for example, the same me that I was “back then?” Or am I a different me now?

These questions begin to connect us with the topic of the self, which I am trying to keep at bay! 

So, having laid out some of the questions, I turn to the first of my three ways of understanding time:

 

The Pragmatics of Time

Even if we are not sure what it is, for purposes of normal life we define and use time. And the most common way we define and use it is through the means we employ to measure it:

The practical, pragmatic ways of understanding time skip over all the metaphysics and jump right to describing the experience and use of time.

For example, I came across this definition of time: “time is the continuous progression of our changing existence.” That defines time, not as it “is,” but in terms of our experience of it.

Another definition, which avoids the experiential and the theoretical aspects of time altogether is: “time is what a clock reads.”

In other words, time is whatever system of measurements we use to sequence events, to compare the duration of events (or the intervals between them), and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc. 

Clocks are not all we use to measure time, for humans have used shadows and sundials, pendulums and gears, sand and water. Is time what a clock reads, or is it what the sand says? Is time the line of a shadow?

But, assuming we agree to use a clock, which clock? Who’s clock? How accurate is the clock we agree to use? Atomic clocks use the frequency of electronic transitions in certain atoms to measure the unit of time we call the second. Since 1967, the International System of Measurements has defined the second as 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation in certain controlled contexts. But how many of us have access to such refined measurements? Is my phone clock even accurate? And if I define time by what my clock says, and my clock is not accurate, then what does it actually mean?

Time can also be measured relative to motion and space: miles per hour (or kilometers), or “that is an hour away from here.” Or “it takes 24 hours for the earth to circle the sun.” And of course, there is the discovery of, and the measurement of, the speed of light.

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity states that the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest speed in the universe, 186,000 miles per second. This definition, notice, assumes we know what a mile is, and thus it assumes our way of understanding and measuring the physical world. That assumption continues when we press further into what we mean by the speed of light. For it is only particles that have no mass that can travel at the speed of light. The only thing that can travel that fast, in other words, is something that is not a thing. Which takes me right back to the topic of my prior Episodes: what is the nature of the cosmos?

At the same time (I say smiling to myself), time is a social necessity. We need some sort of way to use and agree about the use of time for the most common aspects of life: meeting friends, calculating rates of pay, knowing what it means to be late, and as a result, how do we know if someone was rude. 

All of that means that we need to have common, shared ways to talk about and understand and use time, even if we don’t know what it is. For such purposes it does not matter if how we agree to talk about time matches what is “real”, as long as we use the same conventions in how we use it.

This is in fact how much of human life functions relative to time. There is no necessity of defining or thinking deeply about time for various fields of human existence such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts to incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. The performance of the stock exchange is communicated in relationship to a daily closing time. Musicians measure beats per minute and structure music in things like 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8. The old barrier of the 4-minute mile is another example. 

None of those examples require that we know or even think about what time really is, nor does it matter if our means of measuring it are exactly accurate. We simply have to be using the same conventions. 

This facet of the pragmatics of time suggests to me how intricately time is wrapped up with people, not just in the sense that people make use of it, but it is people who perceive it and experience it and those perceptions and experiences shape how we define it, how we measure it. 

This can get circular because our ways of experiencing and using time have a reciprocal relationship with culture. When generations of people who share a common language and a common, general, worldview pass these on to succeeding generations, they also pass on a shared culture of time. Our cultures shape how we experience and use time, and then those experiences and uses of time continue to shape and reinforce the culture that has shaped our experience of it. 

Just think about how different cultures speak about time. In my culture, I grew up hearing people talk about "killing" time. I was around people who worried about wasting it, and I learned by osmosis to look for ways to "pass the time," though people also spoke of time passing as well. It was assumed that one should seize the day and make the most of the time we have. 

Later, living in other cultures, I learned that others experienced time differently, as revealed for example, in the saying I heard in East Africa, “Americans have clocks, Kenyans have time.”

In addition to how language reveals cultural views of time, so too do our calendars. ANd yes, calendars are culture conditioned. Most of us are used to the 12-month, 52 weeks idea of a year, and rarely pause to consider how this convention shapes our culture in profound ways. But in ancient Mayan civilization, calendars were religiously and astronomically based, with 18 months in a year and 20 days in a month, plus five days at the end of the year.

How we answer a question such as “what year is it”, is cultural as well. If I am following the Islamic calendar, for example, my answer will differ from most of yours by hundreds of years.

Again, all these practical and pragmatic ways of using and measuring and experiencing time can function perfectly fine without deeper questions about the essence of time, the nature of time. Right? 

Or can they?

In quantum mechanics, and in fact in most of human history, time has been treated as a universal and absolute parameter. It is one of those things that is constant, it stays put, we might say. You can count on it to be the same everywhere and, yes, I’ll say it, all the time.  

However, in the way time is viewed from the standpoint of general relativity is very different. We know, in fact, that time functions differently in different situations or locations. This means that time would function differently for any people who might be in those situations or locations.

Time is only absolute, then, for people who are in the same place at the same time. Everyone at the edge of a black hole would experience time the same as one another, but very differently from all of us on planet earth. Because time itself works differently.

If our way of understanding time is connected to things like location and movement, then if there were no locations, and nothing was moving from one place to another, would time even exist?

But this begins to move us to the topics of future Episodes. Earlier in this Episode I said I would like at time through three main lenses: Pragmatics, Physics, and Philosophy, including the way some of the great religious heritages look at time. Physics, then, is next in line.

However, before closing and moving right into an exploration of how physics might illuminate the way we understand time, I want to close with another example of how I have experienced or imagined time as an artist.

Anyone who gets to know me at all will come to see pretty quickly that I am a very nostalgic person, I carry the past with me, and I carry it with a good deal of grief, and a very pervasive sense of loss. This of course ends up in my music and poetry. 

I wrote a song at one point in which that sense of melancholy and nostalgia and loss was “metabolized” as it were, and became a very different way of experiencing time, particularly past times. My past. 

I want to share that here, as it seems to fit. It is a song called “Not That Far from Here.” It was on my very first album, “My Religion,” though I have never been fully happy with the way I recorded it then. I am working on a new version, but for now here it is in the version from that album.

 

Not That Far From Here

Pickin’ through memories of what we used to do

The mountains and skies and trails we knew

And wishing it had never disappeared

They say that was then and this is now

But it all feels so real somehow

It feels like it's not that far from here

Yeah, is anything ever all that far from here

 

Yesterday was tomorrow once

And tomorrow will be yesterday when its gone

But I know now that time’s not to be feared

Ten years on when we look back 

At these days that passed while we lost track

Will they really be all that far from here

Yeah is anything ever all that from here

 

A wise man once said not to weep over wonders that have gone passing

But be grateful for the wonder that they ever even happened

 

The souls of the living and the souls of the dead

Are walking hand in hand in the hallways of my head

It’s hard to say what’s really real

And I sit content with all we’ve shared

Cried and lived and smiled and cared,

‘Cause I know it’s not that far from here

No nothing’s ever all that far from here

 

Nothing, and no time, and no place, and no one,

No nothing’s ever all that far from here

 

For me, one of the more meaningful lines in the song, one in which I still find healing, is the line, “I know now, time’s not to be feared.” That was not a line I consciously planned or crafted as I wrote the song, it just sort of came to me, and felt as if some deeper part of me was talking to me, helping me to heal, helping me reframe how I experienced the passing of time.

In the song I arrive at the conclusion that nothing is “that far from here”, that my past is still with me, here, and very real. That means people of my past and events of my past and experiences of my past are in some ways not past.

The past has not passed, if I can say it that way. In a way, working on the podcast is part of continuing to process all of this, and I hope it might be a way for you to process time and the past as well.

However, that conclusion of mine in the song is one that I intuited. Not one I arrived at through reasoning. 

Will my intuited way of seeing time stand up to the scrutiny of physics and philosophy? I look forward to what future Episodes will bring to the surface. 

Until next time…