As I prepare to write for each month’s theme, I pursue several lines of thought. First of all, why did I choose that theme? What is it I want to get across to my readers? Then I begin to engage in conversations with friends about the theme and get their reactions. I begin to notice how the theme fits into what I’m reading, viewing, and hearing. And, most often, I Google it, getting pulled into the information vortex and losing hours and hours in my pursuit of whatever white rabbit I’m following.

So here’s a riddle I came across: I am everywhere, but I occupy no space. You can spend me, but you can’t destroy me or even change me, and there is never any more or less of me. Everyone knows me and uses me every day, but no one is able to define me. What am I? Of course, the answer is Time.

I learned all sorts of things about Time as I went down the rabbit hole. First, I found Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time, and wound up downloading the audiobook and listening in one sitting. (It’s only about four hours, and it’s fascinating!) Rovelli, called by Amazon “the new Stephen Hawking,” uses physics and literature to describe the nature of Time, which, as it turns out, is not at all as we perceive it.

I was fascinated to hear Rovelli’s description of the relativity of Time—how Time moves more slowly as it nears a large mass. So at altitude, time moves more quickly than at sea level, and in fact, every point in the universe has its own Time. Whoa! This is mind-boggling to me, and yet, it validates my concept of “squishy time,” of which I wrote last week.

Our common perception of Time is something like this definition from Wikipedia: “Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future.” Rovelli refutes this notion, though, in his YouTube video. It’s under an hour long and is definitely worth a listen.

Humans have tried to measure this quantity we call Time for thousands of years. In fact, the oldest known calendar has been discovered in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, a Mesolithic monument built by hunter gatherers about 10,000 years ago. That’s nearly 5,000 years earlier than previously discovered calendars in Mesopotamia. It aligns on the midwinter sunrise, meaning that people have been striving to mark Time’s passage for ten millenia!

By contrast, the most modern and accurate timepiece is in Boulder, Colorado. Launched in April 2016, the NIST-F2 will neither gain nor lose a second in 300 million years. It’s an atomic clock that uses the vibration of a “fountain” of cesium atoms—over 9 billion per second—to measure time more accurately than it has even been measured before.

But considering what Rovelli says, is this “world’s most accurate clock” measuring the accurate intervals of time for only one specific point in the Universe? Wouldn’t an atomic second be different at sea level? Again, mind blown!

In my online searching, I discovered that a “jiffy” is an actual thing, but it means different things in physics and in electronics. In physics, a jiffy is the amount of time it takes light to travel one fermi (about the size of a nucleon) in a vacuum. So if someone says they’ll be there in a jiffy, unless they’re traveling at the speed of light—in a vacuum—and “there “ is only one fermi away, that person is completely exaggerating!

I also came across several terms I’d never encountered before. I’ve heard of nanoseconds, but I had never heard of picoseconds, femtoseconds, zeptoseconds, or yoctoseconds. Just think of each of those as a one divided by a ten trailed by a boat load of zeroes, and you’ll be on the right track. Tiny, tiny fractions of seconds, and the tiniest of them all is the yoctosecond. (Unless you want to get into theoretical physics and talk about Planck time and chronons and things I have no business discussing because I’m already in way, way over my head!)

In trying to comprehend the smallest units of time, I studied a chart that described yoctoseconds as a trillionth of a trillionth of a second—or so many vibrations of a some-sort-of atom (or a quark or something very scientific-sounding). The chart was filled with abbreviations and equations that made me begin to question just how much I actually know about anything—until I saw the definition of a second: “The time it takes to say ‘One Mississippi’.” Seriously?

Then I went the other direction to find the longest unit of time, the supereon, which is composed of eons. An eon, according to Vocabulary.com Dictionary, is “a really, really, super-long, impossible-to-measure length of time.” Well, okie dokie. Then a supereon, because it’s made up of these, must be even more impossible to define. (Can something even be “more impossible?”)

I wound up reading articles about time travel, about wormholes and black holes, about infinite cylinders and cosmic strings. It’s all fascinating, but here is what I finally arrived at: I can’t wrap my mind around a supereon any more than I can conceive of a tiny yoctosecond. Just as I think I might have caught a glimpse of understanding of these measurements, that understanding darts around another corner and is once again beyond my reach. All I can ever really know… is Now.

I live my entire life from one Now to the next. What I think of as the Past is only shadows and impressions we call memory, and what appears to be the Future is just mystery and speculation. And yet, like most people, I tend to live most of my life in the past or future; I grasp pleasant memories and try to relive those cherished moments, or I look back with regret and try to improve upon the past; then I skip forward and worry or hope about future events—things that may or may not come to pass. As I time travel in my own mind into the past or future, I remove myself from being fully present in the Now.

I’m gentle with myself about this fact, because I know that even the most dedicated monks still struggle with living in the present moment, and that thoughts of past or future events meander through every meditator’s mind. I am gentle when I discover myself living in the past; I simply notice it, label it (“ah, memory”), ask it what it wants of me, and then let it go. Well, this is what I do when I notice. But living in any time other than the present is such a habit, it’s quite impossible to live in the Now all the time. Even as I write this, I am aware of my deadline—the Future—and refer back to what I’ve written—the Past. I’m writing of the Now, but am not in the Now. Gently, gently… it’s a practice. And now, I say to you, Dear Reader:

Until next time,