"What is Time?"

I recently saw a post on Facebook about how Argentina’s current president, Cristina Kirchner, had been speaking at one of my friends’ schools and had showed up an hour late to her own presentation. My friend included in the caption a comment about how this was typical of “Argentina time.” I’m wondering what factors in Latin America lead to this perception and how we see “Argentina time” reflected in life in Latin America.

I am going to research the perception of time in Africa. Time in Africa is much more relaxed than in busy, more western areas such a New York City. Africa is said to have an “emotional time consciousness”  which contrasts with Western “mechanical time consciousness”. African cultures follow a “polychronic” way of living, which means people tend to manage more than one thing at a time rather than in a strict sequence.

I am going to be researching the time discoveries and the impact in Ancient Egypt.  Similar to European civilizations, Egypt was very progressive with the idea of time.  Through its discoveries with the sun and stars, Egypt was one of the first countries to have an organized time measurement.  I will look into the various tools and ideas used to create this measured time.

I am going to use India for my research project. I want to do India because they have a different view on time than we do. They believe in something called P-time which means they focus on many things at one time. Along with multi-tasking, they believe in building relationships, or being with people and talking, over following a schedule. They believe in short term goals and by this they live in the present and the immediate future instead of the distant future.

Your essay is impressive and reminds me a lot. I have almost the same experience as yours. I have given up playing piano for more than eight years for my family’s move from one city to another. I remember that when I first time back to the keyboard two years after my last class in piano, I could still play an intact music fluently. I was shocked at that time and what shocked me more was that when I tried to played again by recalling the notes, I could hardly play anything! So just as the conclusion you drew from your essay, my finger remembered all the movements. And this conclusion enlighten me another idea that the past can only exist accurately on concrete material and so the past form into “memory” , but the past depended on pure consciousness will not be firm and can be incorrect.

I cannot agree any more to the point “my past is based upon my present” you made in your essay. It is true that there is special connection between the past and present. It can be said that they are in relation something like symbiosis. I mean, the past must hand down traces on present, and all the actions we take in present must be the results from what we had done in past. For example, my left ankle suffered from serious injury when I was five years old because my whole left foot was rolled into the speedily rotational wheel when I on my way to kindergarten. This horrible injury has past for almost fifteen years and I cannot remember how painful, frightened and desperate at that time, but only the scar on my ankle reminds me this accident. What I can remember is only the physical image but not the chemical feeling because the scar is the vestige came from the past to present and we can only retrospect the past according to concrete object. In the same way, “the past effects the present”. For instance, once I tasted a really sour peach in my elementary school, I thought all the peaches would be sour in that way without exception, and from then on, I hardly eat peaches again.

A Broken Leg

There is a cliché used by man that says “time waits for no man” which infers that time is always moving. Regardless of what you do time does not stop nor slow down.  We often forget that time is not standing still although we may be standing still and want time to stop. Time is a very potent part of one’s life. We experience moments all the time where time is irrelevant for a moment before it is immediately made relevant. For example, L.A. Paul in his journal entry “Temporal Experience” says he stepped outside to a nice breeze cooling his face and then realizes time is passing once the breeze dies down—he needs to begin walking before he is late for class.

Personally, my own temporal experience involved an injury I sustained in preseason camp for football. Everybody that was watching the play where I was injured felt as if everything happened so fast. For me however, the sequence leading up to the injury unfolded in slow motion and time felt as if it was not moving at all after the actual injury. On the third day of preseason camp, August 9^th, 2012, I was given the ball on a run play. As soon as I received the ball and proceeded towards the defense, everything around me seemed to slow down and so did I. I could feel the hot summer air coming through my helmet and hitting my face. Every defender I ran by began to feel as if they were moving much slower now. There was only one defender left and I changed directions in order to avoid him. Immediately I felt time speed up again. He grabbed me by my shoulder pads and proceeded to twist my body. Next, I heard a loud pop and snap which rendered me lying on my in pain yelling and swearing.  I felt my leg buckle and I hit the ground. As I took a look at my leg it was evident that it was broken. The only thing I could do was sit there and stare at my leg. There was no sound only a terrible site. The event that had just unraveled was so surreal and shocking that time stood still for a while. The blissful moment was interrupted when the trainers reached me and forced me to sit still so that they could evaluate the injury.

The ambulance was then called to come and transport me to the hospital. The wait lasted for an hour in a half on their arrival. At least that what the wait felt like to me. The pain caused the time I spent waiting to feel much longer than it actually was. In reality the ambulance arrived in fifteen minutes to take me to the hospital. The ride to the hospital was said to take thirty minutes which I figured would be an extremely long time. However due to the morphine that was given to me, the ride only took about five minutes. Upon arriving at the hospital, I was placed in a room to have x-rays and be evaluated. I was told by Molly, our trainer, that it took forty-five minutes for the doctor to come take a look at my knee. Of course to me it felt like a much longer time due to the excruciating pain I was feeling from my leg. Then I was told that due to the extent of my injury, I would need surgery to repair the damage. Hearing those words caused my mind to slow down, my thought process stalled, and everything around me stopped as I tried to comprehend me having season ending surgery.

They moved me upstairs so that I could undergo immediate surgery. When I made it upstairs, there was a delay and I had to wait for an operating room to become available and prepped. By this time, I remember asking what the time was and I was told 5:45 p.m. The nurse came in ten minutes later and said that she was about to give me some pain medicine. Little did I know I was being sedated for surgery. I woke up five hours later in a hospital bed and what seemed like a five minute nap was actually a five hour sedation.  I was in the hospital for almost a week and I completely lost track of days. Each day I would wake up around ten a.m. to a phone call from the cafeteria requesting to know what I wanted for breakfast. The amount of drugs I was being given caused me to sleep majority of the day away making the days go by faster each day. While I was in the hospital I was never truly aware as to what day it truly was. Before I knew it, I was five days out of surgery and being released.

Finally, I was able to begin to recall the days and know the time of day. However, I was released and admitted once again to the hospital. The pain became unbearable when I was released and I was anxious to get back to the hospital to get pain relief which seemed to take hours upon hours. The amount of time I spent in the hospital was thought to be about three weeks in my mind. The actual time spent was only about eight days total but it felt as though time moved slower when I was in pain and faster when there was no pain.

Your post reminded me of something my dad loves to say- our perceptions are our reality. I completely agree with what you said, that perception affects how we see time. I actually think we have similar concepts of how time works. What I call “objective time,” you call “physical time.” This kind of time cannot be changed. This time is going to pass no matter what we do. On the other side, what I call “subjective time,” you call “personal time.” This kind of time is how we perceive and experience the objective/physical time. I also loved how you said time is a relationship. Time is a relationship. It involves both physical and personal time working together, and it dictates how we live our lives.

I thought you explained the dilemma of time very well. You talked about how the present can be broken down into infinitely small measure of time, and how the past plays a pivotal role in how we experience the present. I agree wholeheartedly that the past affects how we experience the present. Our memories of the past shape our biases that we carry with us into the future. I also agree that in order to experience the present, you have to think about the past. As teenagers, I think this is especially noticeable. We are constantly worrying about how others perceived us in class today or what happened last weekend. Certain events that happened in our past can affect how we see things right now- like with your example of not liking blueberries. It becomes even trickier, like you mentioned, when we add the dimension of the future. So not only are we worrying about something that happened in the past, but we also have to think about the future, an upcoming test, what we’re going to do next weekend or what we’re going to do with our lives after college. In short- experiencing the present involves a careful balance of remembering the past and preparing for the future.