Somewhere in space, a clock floats. Its hands don’t move. But somewhere, a ticking sound keeps going. This has always confused me.
What is time?
We live inside it. We measure everything with it. But we have never seen its face. The morning light, the night’s darkness, every breath, every heartbeat—time runs behind all of it like an invisible thread. Yet we don’t know what it is.
We cannot hold it. We cannot photograph it. We cannot put it under a microscope. We can only feel its passing. Like wind. You don’t see wind. You see leaves moving. You don’t see time. You see hair turning grey. You see children growing tall. You see empires rising and falling. But time itself remains invisible.
I think about this sometimes. Late at night, when the house is quiet. If everything has a beginning, when did time begin? Who made it? The moment I ask this question, my head starts spinning. To talk about the beginning of time, I need to use words like “before” and “after.” But if time didn’t exist, there was no “before.” You see the problem? We are trapped. Our language is trapped. Our thoughts are trapped.
Every question about time’s origin leads to another question. It is turtles all the way down. We ask what came before. Then what came before that. The chain never ends. Or it ends in something our minds cannot grasp. A beginning without a before. An existence outside of sequence. These words make grammatical sense but logical nonsense.
Philosophers have wrestled with this for thousands of years. They have not won. Augustine said it best. “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.” That was sixteen hundred years ago. We have built computers since then. We have split atoms. We have walked on the moon. But we still cannot answer Augustine’s question.
Let me tell you something interesting. When a writer writes a story, they create time for that story. The characters in the story live in that time. They see morning. They see evening. Years pass for them. They grow old. But the writer sits outside that time. The writer can finish a whole day on one page. Or stretch a single moment across ten pages. The characters don’t know this. They think their time is real.
Maybe we are like those characters. Maybe someone created time for us. We live inside it, thinking it’s everything. But outside, there might be a world where time doesn’t exist at all.
This is not just poetry. Some physicists believe something similar. They say time might be an illusion. A useful illusion. Like the horizon. The horizon looks real. You can point to it. But when you walk toward it, it moves away. It doesn’t exist as a thing. It exists as a way of seeing.
Think of a river. You are a fish in that river. You swim forward. You think you are leaving the past behind. The future is ahead. But imagine someone standing on a mountain, looking down at the river. They see the whole river at once. The beginning, the middle, the end—all visible together.
Time might be like this. We are the fish. We float in time’s current. We think the past is gone, the future is coming. But whoever made time might see everything at once. Our yesterday, our today, our tomorrow—all existing together. This thought keeps me awake some nights.
If this is true, then nothing is really lost. Your childhood still exists somewhere. The dead are still alive somewhere. Every moment you have ever lived continues to be. We just cannot see it from inside the river. We only see the water rushing past.
Some call this the “block universe.” All of time exists at once, like a loaf of bread. We experience it slice by slice. But the whole loaf is always there. Past, present, future—just different locations in the block. Not different states of existence.
Science says the universe started with a big explosion. With that explosion, space was born. And time was born too. Before that, nothing. No space. No time. But wait—if there was no time, how can I say “before”? What does “before” mean if time doesn’t exist?
This is the circle. Once you enter, you cannot leave. Our minds stand on time. We cannot imagine anything outside it. We are prisoners who don’t know we are in prison.
Even our mathematics fails here. Equations need time. Causation needs time. Logic needs sequence. Without time, nothing follows from anything else. We cannot reason our way outside the thing that makes reasoning possible.
When I was a child, days felt very long. A single holiday seemed to last forever. Now, a whole week passes and I wonder where it went. Happy moments disappear in seconds. Painful times drag on for ages. Why?
Scientists have studied this. They say it relates to how much new information we process. Children experience everything as new. Every day brings unfamiliar sights, sounds, ideas. Their brains work hard to record it all. For adults, most days repeat what came before. The brain stops paying close attention. It skips over the familiar. And skipped time feels like no time at all.
This explains why vacations in new places feel longer than weeks at home. Why the drive to somewhere new seems longer than the drive back. Novelty stretches time. Routine compresses it.
Maybe time connects to our minds. When we focus, time flies. When we suffer, time crawls. Time is not as fixed as the clock shows. It bends. It stretches. It plays tricks on us.
A watched pot never boils. Everyone knows this. But why? The pot boils at the same speed whether you watch or not. The water doesn’t know you’re impatient. Yet watching changes everything. Your attention changes your experience of duration. This is strange. This means time is not entirely outside us. Part of it lives in our minds.
Dreams show this clearly. Sometimes in a dream, years seem to pass. You travel, you meet people, you live a whole life. Then you wake up. Only ten minutes have passed. Where did that dream-time come from? Your mind made it. Your consciousness created it.
I once dreamed an entire relationship. Meeting someone. Falling in love. Years of life together. Then I woke in my childhood bed. I was fifteen. The whole thing happened in one night’s sleep. For hours afterward, I grieved someone who never existed. The feelings were real. The time was not. Or was it? What makes one kind of time more real than another?
Death raises even stranger questions. When someone dies, does time stop for them? Or do they enter some other time? If there is no consciousness, there is no feeling of time. So maybe time and consciousness cannot exist without each other. If the universe had no conscious beings, would time exist? I don’t know the answer. Nobody does.
Think about dreamless sleep. Where do you go? Hours pass but you experience nothing. For you, no time happens. You close your eyes at midnight, open them at seven. In between—nothing. Not even blackness. Just absence. Maybe death is like that. Maybe death is the end of personal time. The universe continues. But your river stops flowing.
Or maybe consciousness does something we don’t understand. Maybe it continues in a form we cannot imagine. Maybe time works differently after death. These are questions science cannot answer. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
In our daily life, time feels like a war. We wake up late. We rush to work. We rush back home. Always running. Always behind. But is this really time’s nature? Or is it our life’s nature? Maybe time itself is peaceful. We made it into a race.
We have more time-saving devices than any generation before us. Washing machines. Microwaves. Cars. Computers. Yet we feel more rushed than ever. Something is wrong with this equation. We save time but have no time. Where does the saved time go? We fill it with more doing. More tasks. More goals. We are like hamsters on a wheel, running faster, going nowhere.
Long ago, people knew time through sunrise and sunset. They watched seasons change. They counted months by the moon. Their time moved with nature. Our time moves with machines. Seconds, minutes, hours—all mechanical. We have forgotten the natural rhythm. This might be why we feel so tired.
Before clocks, time was approximate. “I’ll meet you when the sun is high.” “Come back after the harvest.” This was enough. Life flowed without exact measurements. Then came factories. Factories needed workers at exact times. Suddenly, minutes mattered. Being five minutes late meant something. Time became a weapon. A tool of control.
Some cultures still resist this. They live in “event time” rather than “clock time.” Things happen when they happen. A meeting starts when everyone arrives. A meal is ready when it’s ready. They are not lazy. They just measure differently. And perhaps more humanely.
Love has a strange relationship with time. Love happens in a moment. Then it grows with time. It changes with time. Sometimes it fades with time. Lovers want to stop time. They want that happy moment to last forever. But time doesn’t stop for anyone. Maybe this is why love feels so precious. Because we know it exists in time. And time keeps moving.
The awareness of ending makes things beautiful. Cherry blossoms. Sunsets. Youth. If they lasted forever, would we treasure them? Probably not. Scarcity creates value. Time creates scarcity. So time creates beauty. This is a strange gift from our prison.
Memory is another puzzle. We remember the past. But when we remember, it happens now. The past comes to the present. So is the past really gone? Or does it hide somewhere, waiting to be remembered? Every time I smell a certain flower, I remember my grandmother. She died twenty years ago. But in that moment, she is alive in my mind. Time collapses. Twenty years become nothing.
Memory is a time machine. A limited one. It only goes backward. And it often lies. We remember things that didn’t happen. We forget things that did. Our past is partly fiction. We edit it constantly, without knowing. The person you remember being ten years ago is not who you really were. Memory serves the present, not the past.
The future is equally confusing. It hasn’t happened yet. But we think about it now. We plan. We dream. We worry. The future exists only in our imagination. Yet it controls so much of our present. We sacrifice today for a tomorrow that isn’t even real yet.
Anxiety is about the future. Depression often about the past. Peace lives only in the present. But the present is so thin. By the time you notice it, it’s already gone. We live our whole lives in a moment that vanishes before we can grasp it.
Look at the stars tonight. You are looking at the past. Starlight takes millions of years to reach us. The star you see might have died long ago. But its light still travels. We see what was, not what is. Distance and time mix together and confuse everything.
This means there is no universal “now.” What is happening right now on a star ten light-years away? The question has no answer. “Now” is local. It depends on where you are. Two events can happen in different orders depending on who observes them. This is not philosophy. This is physics.
Speed changes time too. Move very fast, and time slows down for you. This is not fantasy. Scientists have proved it. If you travel in a spaceship at nearly the speed of light, when you come back, everyone you knew will be dead. A hundred years might have passed here. For you, only a few years.
They tested this with atomic clocks on airplanes. The clocks ran slower in the air than on the ground. Only by billionths of a second. But measurably slower. Time is not constant. It flows at different rates. We just move too slowly to notice.
Gravity also bends time. Near a massive planet, time moves slowly. In open space, it moves quickly. Time is not the same everywhere. It changes. It flows differently in different places.
Your head ages faster than your feet. Very slightly. Because your head is farther from the earth’s center. Less gravity. Time moves faster. After eighty years, the difference is about ninety billionths of a second. Not much. But real. Your body lives in different time zones.
After thinking about all this, one thing becomes clear. We live with time. But we don’t know time. We are born in it. We grow up in it. We die in it. But its face remains hidden.
Maybe this is the final mystery. If we knew everything, there would be nothing left to wonder about. Time has given us the ability to ask questions. With these questions, we try to touch its mystery. We will never fully understand. And perhaps that is okay.
Perhaps understanding is not the point. Perhaps wondering is the point. The question itself is the destination. Not the answer.
The clock in space keeps floating. Silent. Still. Yet somewhere, the ticking continues. It has no beginning. It has no end. Like time itself.
Or maybe I’m wrong about everything. Maybe time is simpler than I think. Maybe it’s more complex than anyone can imagine.
I look at the clock on my wall. It ticks. One second. Another second. Each second, a small death. Each second, a small birth. And I sit here, watching, wondering, trapped in time’s beautiful mystery.
That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows.
And maybe that’s enough.
