I can’t honestly tell you when this started happening, but I have found that I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to subjects that would never have crossed my mind 10 years ago. I don’t know if this is simply one of the things that happens when you get old, or if it is due to the fact that my mind has much more free time since I retired a few years back. Maybe its a little bit of both, who knows.
Sometimes, when I least expect it, a random thought will pop into my head; something so out of the ordinary that I ask myself, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ Then there are times that I will be reading something, and a single word sets off a rapid fire chain reaction of thoughts that is so intense that I can no longer focus my mind on what I was reading; or writing for that matter. Whichever the case may be, there is one thing that is common; I find that my mind refuses to let go of that thought until I have given it a thorough examination; looked at it from every conceivable angle.
The latest thought that has taken up so much of my mind’s free time is…well…time. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about what time it is, or how much more of it I have left before I return to the dust from whence I came, but time itself; what it is and how we go about measuring it.
I can pretty much pinpoint the cause of this; it dates back a week or so ago when I was listening to the song Time off the album, Dark Side of the Moon; loud enough that neighbors halfway down the block were probably wondering where the sound of all those bells and alarm clocks at the beginning of the song was coming from. Putting aside the fact that I ‘occasionally’ like to listen to my music at concert level, it was probably the following lyrics that got my mind to start thinking about time:
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Since I lack the ability to peer inside other people’s minds (a concept truly horrifying) I cannot say for sure what thoughts lay deep within the gray matter between their ears; if any. That being the case, I have no idea if people have given ‘time’ the kind of deep dive that I have since Pink Floyd got this whole ball of wax going for me. If anyone has, then I think they would agree with me when I say that it is a pretty interesting rabbit hole to dive into.
What I truly found daunting was trying to come up with a suitable definition for the word time; without the aid of a dictionary or Google. I found it truly strange; knowing what something is, yet being unable to define or describe it. The closest I’ve come to that in the past was when I tried to come up with a definition for air; something we all need to survive, but at the same time, something we cannot see or lay our hands upon. The only difference between the two, in my opinion, is that air can be captured and contained; while time cannot.
Since I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory definition for ‘time’ on my own, I had to crack open my well-worn copy of Merriam Webster’s dictionary to see how they define it. Turning to page 1154 we find the word ‘time’ being defined as: a non spatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. I’ll be honest with you, there is absolutely no similarity between how Merriam Webster’s defines it and my feeble efforts to define it; none whatsoever!
There is a scene in Season 1 of the miniseries Westworld when Maeve asks Felix why she keeps recalling images that keep overlapping two different realities. Felix explains to her that since she is a host (robot) every event that occurred in her life is recorded in perfect detail; while humans tend to view events from their past more from the perspective of the emotions those events caused them to feel. In Maeve’s case, she was unable to chronologically categorize those memories, reconcile them with past roles she had been given, which was why she felt like she was going crazy. I found that to be an interesting concept; the inability to identify when an event actually occurred. I also thought that it might provide a decent segue into the subject of how we measure time.
Think about that for a moment; how would you know when you were supposed to show up for work, or be at the doctors office, if you could not measure time? How could historians tell us about events from the past if there was not a standard unit of measurement for time?
Time, as in a single moment in time, is measured in seconds; which are fragments of minutes; which are fragments of hours; which are fragments of days; which are fragments of weeks; which are fragments of months; which are fragments of a solar year. At least, that is how I understand it. In other words, there are 60 seconds in one minute; 60 minutes in one hour; 24 hours in one day; 7 days in one week; months are tricky because they are not all the same length, but there are 365 days in one year. Or, you could put it this way; there are 36,000 seconds in an hour; 86,400 seconds in a day; 604,000 seconds in a week, and 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Of course, for periods of time exceeding a year, we use decades, centuries, and millennia; but that is the standard unit of measurement we have come up with to measure the passage of time.
Just to give you an idea of how interesting a rabbit hole time is, if I were to call my friend Jamie Bell on the telephone, although we would be talking live (real time) his time zone is 3 hours ahead of mine. So, would I be talking to someone from the future? My wife’s family is in the Philippines; and they are 16 hours ahead of me. Then there are the Diomede Islands; located in the Bering Strait. Big Diomede belongs to Russia and is only about 3 miles from Little Diomede; which belongs to the United States. However, since they sit on opposite sides of the International Date Line, they are 21 hours apart. Try to wrap your head around that; an island you can literally see from your island being almost a day ahead of you in time!
Now let’s get back to how the good folks at Merriam Webster’s define ‘time.’ I found the fact that the dictionary defines time as being a nonspatial continuum intriguing; seeing as how I wasn’t sure what that meant, I decided to do some digging into the matter. According to what I found, a nonspatial continuum is described as being: a continuous dimension that is not related to physical space. If we are to assume that the word ‘continuous’ implies something that is unending, then that is quite the rabbit hole in and of itself; for how is it possible for something to be so vast, yet take up absolutely no physical space? Even subatomic particles take up space; yet we cannot see time; we cannot touch time; we cannot capture, contain, or control time…only God can do that!
I’ll bet that, when I started talking about time, you never thought about the fact that even God measures its passage, “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Genesis 1:5) Yet, is one day of God’s time the same as one day of ours; 2 Peter 3:8 states, “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Yet God gave us the lights above (in the firmament) to aid us in the telling (measuring) of time, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” (Genesis 1:14)
Have you ever noticed how time sometimes seems to drag by at a snail’s pace, and other times it flies by so fast that you wonder where it went? That was one of the first thoughts that came to mind after listening to the song Time, from Dark Side of the Moon; what got this whole ball of wax rolling.
I can say with absolute certainty that whenever I have one of my periodic bouts of insomnia the seconds tick by so agonizingly slow that I’d swear time has come to a complete standstill. Then there are times when I find myself engrossed so deeply in something that, when I look up, half a day has passed by. Yet regardless of whether time is dragging by, or flying by so fast I can barely see it, 60 seconds is still 60 seconds; meaning that our perception concerning the passage of time is relative to the activity we are engaged in.
Now here is something that might throw you for a loop. Have you ever been asked the philosophical question; ‘If a tree falls down in the woods, but no one is around to see it, does it make a sound?’ Well, here is a similar question; If we (humans) did not exist, if the earth did not exist, would time still exist? I told you at the outset, when I get one of these thoughts in my head I examine it from EVERY angle!!!
I can’t recall where, or when, I read this, but I once read time explained as follows: Let us say that a man is standing at a point along some railroad tracks as a train approaches staring straight ahead. What he sees in front of him is his ‘present’ and the train is still a ways off in his ‘future.’ As the engine passes by, it becomes his ‘present’, with the remainder of the train still being in his future. Then, as the engine passes by, it becomes his ‘past’, the car in front of him becomes his ‘present’ and the rest of the train his ‘future.’ This process repeats over and over until the train has passed by him; even though the man remained motionless the entire time.
The description then went on to say: Now, if you introduce a second person, and place them a ways off from the first, their present/past/future is going to be different from the present/past/future of the other individual; for their position along the timeline is also different.
If time is eternal, having neither beginning or end, then what is our lifetime in comparison? Barely the blink of an eye in comparison to eternity; if that. Imagine finding yourself in a vast desert with nothing but sand for miles in every direction. That desert is time, and if you were to bend down and pick up one grain of sand, that is your lifespan in comparison to the vastness of eternity. Our lives will begin and end, and time will barely notice our passing; if it notices at all. The same goes for countries and empires; they too come and go; yet time keeps on ticking away.
I have heard people say that they wish they could live forever. The only thing I have to say about that is; be careful what you wish for. I think those who say that have not given the word ‘forever’ the kind of thought it deserves; forever is one hell of a long time when time itself has no end!
Yet even Hollywierd has attempted to discuss the concept of living forever in some of the films it has produced. I was always a monster movie buff as a kid, and my favorite monsters were the vampires. Regardless of whether it was Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, I always liked the vampire movies best of all. So it comes as no surprise that I became a big fan of the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. I recently re-watched the film, Queen of the Damned, based upon the novel of the same name. Although they absolutely butchered the novel, Stuart Townsend was a far better Lestat than Tom Cruise could ever hope to be.
But that is not why I bring that up. The film begins as a camera passes through a cemetery, ending in front of a marble crypt; all while the Vampire Lestat states the following narrative, “There comes a time for every vampire when the idea of eternity becomes momentarily unbearable…” The reason I chose Queen of the Damned, and not some other vampire film, is because it is the only one I’ve seen that addressed the concept of living forever; how unbearable it might actually be.
However, it is not just vampire films that address that issue. How many of you have ever watched the original Highlander movie? In it there is a scene when Ramirez (played by Sean Connery) tells McCloud (played by Christopher Lambert) to let his woman go; for it will only bring him heartbreak when she grows old and dies, while he remains young forever. Even the rock band Queen gets involved when Freddie Mercury sings, ‘Who wants to live forever?’
The topic is also ‘briefly’ touched upon in the fan favorite Twilight; when Edward Cullen confesses to Bella Swan that his ‘vampire’ family has to relocate every so often because people become suspicious when they do not age.
However, it is not just movies that address this as well; there is music and literature as well. The Canadian rock band Rush produced an 11 minute epoch entitled Xanadu; based upon the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Colderidge. In the final verse of the song, singer Geddy Lee sings, “To taste my bitter triumph as a mad immortal man.” (Lyrics by Neil Peart)
Of all the examples I have given, I think that one is the most concise; for I think that most people would eventually go mad if they were given the gift (or would it be considered a curse) of eternal life. Sure, the first century or so might be okay; but you would (I’m sure of it) reach a point where you had regretted asking for eternal life; a point where you longed for death.
The thing is, if my understanding of Scripture is correct, we are all looking at eternal life; “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) The only real question is, where are we going to spend eternity; in the Kingdom of Heaven, or in the pit with Satan and all the other fallen angels who rebelled against God.
And that is as far as I intend to take this; I just wanted to share with you a few of the thoughts that my mind has been tossing and turning around since hearing that Pink Floyd song. I hope that I have given you something to think about; just not as obsessively as I did.
February 28, 2025
~ The Author ~
Neal Ross, Student of history, politics, patriot and staunch supporter of the 2nd Amendment. Send all comments to: [email protected].
If you liked Neal’s latest column, maybe you’ll like his book: The Civil War: (The Truth You Have Not Been Told). Life continues to expand for this prolific writer and guardian of TRUE American history.