Tell me if you do this. I set clocks ahead of the real time. For example, if it’s 10 a.m., the clock by my bed will say 10:09.
Same in the car, though it might say 10:08. I’m already feeling the smiles of recognition as you read this.
I, and you who do this, are trying to trick ourselves.
When you look up at the clock you go: Oh my gosh it’s 8:15, I have an 8:30 meeting. Adrenaline kicks in. Then you remember don’t you, Groundhog Day suckers, that it’s actually only 8:06. Just doing that calculation stimulates your brain again. You’re up.
(Some people do do this, right? I’m just hoping it’s not some LBD symptom and everyone is out there going, ‘All righty then.’ Onward.)
People familiar with this blog know I have been diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia, about a year ago. It’s a degenerative brain disease that affects movement and memory, to varying degrees in varying people. There is no cure and no known cause. But the sad fact is that the average lifespan after initial diagnosis is 4 to 7 years, according to the Lewy Body Dementia Association.
I have time, but probably less of it than the average 58 year-old.
So given this unexpected deadline in my life, I’ve been pondering some big questions about mortality, death, life and existence. You can imagine I’ve been a big hit on the holiday party circuit.
PARTYGOER: Hello Mike, I’m Jim. I am your next door neighbor’s friend’s cousin.
ME: What’s time?
PARTYGOER: (Looking at his watch): Oh it’s 7:50, Ten to 8.
ME: No! What is time?
(I enunciate with dramatic impact on the ‘is’.)
PARTYGOER: (Looks at me and squints after staring at his watch. He knows what time it is, alright: Time to go.)
So forgive my navel gazing. You may want to stop here because I dig myself into a black hole on this one as this blog post goes on.
You may not have time to read about time.
I worry I don’t have time to write about time, but am pulled by a great compulsion to understand more than I understand now. I know this has been studied some by Albert Einstein among others. But let’s just say I’m going to approach this without that extra burden of knowing anything at all about quantum physics.
I don’t have time.
How many times do you hear that? Or say that? What does it mean?
Doesn’t everybody have time? At least up until the end of life. So it’s not that we don’t have time, it’s just that we prioritized the time in a way that there is no more of it for something else.
[Hint No. 2, initiallythe poet and the character,]
But you could make time? You could cancel your 2 p.m. meeting to have lunch with your third grade classmate, whom you haven’t seen in decades, since, well, third grade. He’s just passing through. It’s your decision to make time or not.
Making time for lunch doesn’t mean you actually created any more time; you 
just replaced one time consumer with another. (BTW, go see the snotty little third grader, he might be interesting. This actually happened to me in Florida and I didn’t make time. Felt guilty for 20 years.)
People after long boring meetings (not at our work place, of course) have been known to say, ‘Well that’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.”
Buck Chavez, a coach and semi-legendary basketball star in Marin County, Calif., was forever hustling everyone to get our Saturday pick-up games going. He hated the long process of shooting for teams. “Time is one thing they don’t make any more of,” he used to loudly proclaim.
My problem, starting with not having a degree in quantum physics, is that I always want to peek behind the curtain.
How does time work? Einstein has posited that time travel is possible, in theory, but there are so many paradoxes that make it seemingly impossible.
A chat website on a NASA.gov page featured a timely discussion about time travel, saying we are already traveling through time at the rate of 1 hour per hour.
It’s bending it down to something like 50 minutes per hour where time travel would be possible. Is that right? Kind of like messing with the time on your alarm clock. Or maybe that should be 70 minutes per hour? I’m already confusing myself.
Did I mention that I know absolutely nothing about quantum physics. Or the theory of relatives. (Although I do know that sitting in a dull meeting makes time seem unbearably slower than a vacation day on the beach.)
Here’s how the NASA folks on the website explain time travel based on Einstein’s theories.
Say you were 15 years old when you left Earth in a spacecraft traveling at about 99.5% of the speed of light (which is much faster than we can achieve now), and celebrated only five birthdays during your space voyage. When you get home at the age of 20, you would find that all your classmates were 65 years old, retired, and enjoying their grandchildren! Because time passed more slowly for you, you will have experienced only five years of life, while your classmates will have experienced a full 50 years.
So, shoot, keep up the support for Lewy Body dementia research, but I’m keeping an eye on time travel research as well.
A colleague of mine, AL.com and Reckoning columnist John Archibald gave me a book called Einstein’s Dreams. It’s a well regarded fictional collection by Alan Lightman. They are short ruminations of what Einstein might have been dreaming in 1906 when he worked at the patent office in Switzerland, pre-E=MC-squared.
One essay asks us to imagine a world in which people live just one day.
A lifetime is compressed to one turn of earth on its axis, or the rotation is slowed so much that one revolution of the earth occupies a whole human life.
(Hmmm. It doesn’t say anything about dog years . Sorry Gus.)
So one day, one life. That means, the book says, “a man or woman sees one sunrise, one sunset. In this world no one lives to witness the change of the season.”
On the other hand, suppose people live forever, the book says in another essay. Each city would divide into two groups, the Nows and the Laters.
The Nows, knowing they’ll live forever want to take advantage of everything, learning new skills, meeting new family members (think of your Christmas list as your grandchildren and their children live forever and procreating more relatives), trying new jobs, etc. Meanwhile, the Laters sit around and drink coffee and say, eh, I’ve got plenty of time to get to that. Sounds a little like the dichotomy I set up in Random vs. Straight Playlist.
I think I would be a Later, kind of like I think I lean more toward Random. That said, I think right now, I’m a Now.
So science has just enough answers to make it more confusing — and tantalizing. Art, like the Einstein Dreams novel, can help us understand. Or confuse us more.
Who better describes the bittersweet nature of passing time than T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
That’s what time is for us, I think. Measuring, counting minutes and longing for those moments long ago that we see frozen in photographs. And I think it is unfortunate that we see time as a measurement of a thing we don’t really understand.
For us, it’s not really what time is — but it’s what the clock says. Even if you change the time 9 minutes ahead on that clock, that doesn’t mean time changed. It may have momentarily changed your perception of time. But that was an illusion.
Kevin Harris in a forum on the Christian website Reasonable Faith said in a posting:
I think timelessness of God and his creation is the best explanation of all the evidence. True existence seems to be the eternal ‘now.’ Real time is imaginary; the mind imagines it. Imaginary time is what seems real to the human mind. But the human mind is simply observing motion and changes in the physical universe.
Imaginary? Or a signpost to the truth.
The Flaming Lips in ‘Do You Realize?’:
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.