autobiography of time

Time: The Past, The Present, and The Future

            Each person perceives time differently, and as time passes each person can perceive the same event differently than the time before. Any moment of time is constantly changing from one millisecond to the next millisecond and therefore, what is time? The passing of milliseconds to milliseconds? The passing of the present? Or the reflecting of the past that was once in the present? The past and the present are very connected and the past affects the present and the present affects the past memories. The present is constantly changing with a blink of an eye. This makes it hard to pin point what the present actually is. If it is passing by so quickly then we cannot have one specific moment to say that that was the present because it is now the past.

I am always living in the present and therefore, what I am doing in a specific second of time is the present for that second. However, as soon as that second of time is up, then I am living in a different present time. It is hard to say that a second of time is the present time because technically that one second of time is made up of milliseconds of time. We can say we are living in the present decade and that is correct. However, part of this decade has already become the past and part is still the future. Two years and eight and a half months are already in the past for this particular decade. We still have seven years and three and a half months left in the future of this decade. However, you can still break that down into the amount of days that have passed already in this ‘present’ decade, and also the days that are still to come in the future.  Time can always be broken down into smaller increments.

Time can continuously be broken down into smaller amounts of time. Time correspondingly accounts for the present time to be broken down into smaller amounts and measures of time. This measurement of time is hard to make the present seem like a real thing. The present is relative to a specific moment in time. That specific moment is hard to break down into a specific amount of time.

If the present time is always passing then the past is continuously growing. We are constantly gaining the past. If I think about my life, then I have more past times than future times and many more past times than the present time. If the present time is so small and is broken down into specific milliseconds, then why, when we think about the past, are we not thinking about certain milliseconds? Why are we not able to break down the past into the same milliseconds as the present is broken down into?

The consistent breaking down of time into increments in the present shows that the past is not based upon the same rules of the present. I am not able to think of my past as a specific millisecond of a day in a certain year. That being said, I can not think of my past without putting my present and current bias and thoughts into that certain memory. My memories are based upon my present thoughts: my past is based upon my present. If I think back to a memory of eating blueberries as a child, I will think that I was being forced to eat them. This is because I do not like blueberries now, in the present time. Emotions and present feeling toward a concept or event causes distorted memories of the past. However, I could have very well loved blueberries at that time and just have grown to dislike them. I am not sure because my present thoughts are reflected in my memories of the past.

This also works the other way around: the past can affect the present time. If in the past I have fallen off of a bike and remember being on the ground with a bike next to me while I was crying, then my present thoughts on that memory will take me away from riding a bike. This memory may have been when I was seven years old, but that one moment in time that used to be the present time and is not is the past time, is affecting my actions of this present time. This will most likely affect my future time as well, since my future will become my present time at some point and then my current present will be my past in the future. I will still have this memory of my past and will be able to refer back to it in the future.

Therefore, this difficulty in breaking down the measurements of time and deciding what the past is, causes a struggle in living life. Everyone always says “forget about the past and live in the present.” However, this is extremely hard to accomplish because in order to live in the present, you have to think about the past. That being said, to think about your past you are adding your present thoughts into it and therefore thinking about your present while you are thinking about your past. The future is just another element to add to the confusion of what time actually is. We are not able to figure out what the present time is specifically because we are constantly moving and we do not stay in the present time for more that a millisecond, or even smaller than that. The past is constantly growing and we continuously change from the past to the present to the future again.