A thief of time

A gentle reminder that time is cultural, irreversible, and our own.

The idea struck yesterday when I was curled up on a beige sofa, more aged than me, after reluctantly agreeing to watch a German war film with my dad. I quickly reconfirmed that dusty, bloody invasions of Moscow did not make for my favorite evening pastime. But I still sat through the hour long film.

Completely engrossed, eyes brimming with tears, my dad quietly said, “War changes everything.” I was taken aback by his emotion. Afterwards, I scoured Wikipedia for articles on the eastern front, the Polish resistance movement, and the Red Army. For some reason, that night I felt closer to my dad, a history aficionado. I was grateful for spending that hour reading wonky English subtitles. 

I realized that since break started, each day at home has been marked by one single event or experience that I remember for bringing me a lot of joy. January 9th: World War II movie night. January 7th: Talks about immigration and mental models with a new friend from San Francisco. December 29th: Playing a new board game by the lake with my childhood friend and her boyfriend. And the rest of my hours and days blended together. I read, I laughed, I cooked. Fuzzy was a nice contrast from hyper-clarity, a state that marked my fall semester. With a wider aperture and a blurrier background, I found more joy in the focal points.

Don’t worry, I know this is winter break and normal life has deadlines, bills, and responsibilities, but ‘normal’ doesn’t necessitate a colorfully crammed montage of a google calendar where each fifteen minute window is proudly slotted in. At school, like many other Yalies, a day would look like three classes, two scheduled meals with friends, a research call, a coffee study date that dissolves into catching up, perhaps a church group meeting, then a late night study session in the new humanities building (kindly dubbed ‘HQ’), and finally crashing at 2am. No, this is not a piece about busy, overcommitted Yale students. Two years ago, I already wrote about Yalies being late all the time. And I, by no means, hope to defend this habit. But it does make me wonder if we have been ‘punctual’ for so long—running errands for others, society and its standards of success—that we compensate by flopping to the opposite end of the spectrum. Being late is running things on our own time with less regard for other things and people. Yes, call it self-centered. But who’s to say time is not? 

Time was a suitor that made sure to visit my mind every so often. Her layovers have lasted weeks or minutes, but each time, she made sure I understood just how priceless and imaginative she could be. One of the few vivid memories I have before age twelve was one of a car ride to the airport. I was in first grade and buckled in the back seat of a church friend’s old sedan. My mom travelled to Shenzhen for a business trip, which was the first time I had ever been separated from her. The two weeks she was gone felt like an eternity for my then-seven-year-old self. That night we were picking her up. As the car sailed down the curved roads, I remember staring at the hazy sky wondering if this woman we were picking up was even my mom? How much could she have changed in two weeks? What if her voice is different and her eyes feel foreign and her smile feels unfamiliar—what if she’s an alien wearing a cloak of my mom’s skin? Outlandish in hindsight, I know. I wondered how much time I had left with her after losing two weeks together. I didn’t want to ever separate from her. That’s when the concept of death first clicked. Ma and I would not live together forever, a reality that sent me balling. 

Time is one of the most complex and confusing topics philosophers, scientists, overthinkers have spilled ink on. Often, time is associated with the temporality of two events. Aristotle and Leibniz propelled the reductionist viewpoint that time is not independent of the events that occur with respect to time. Relationist thinking about time and space also extends to the theory of relative motion: all motion is relative to some frame of reference. On the other hand, Plato and Newton argued for an absolutist framing of time or “substantivalism” where movement is measured to absolute space and time. 

Is time absolute, flowing regardless of its relation to anything, or is it subjective? Do we have the freedom to determine what happens in the future or is it unavoidable? I don’t know. I wouldn’t say I’m a fatalist who believes in predetermined everythings because that feels powerless. I prefer more empowering life philosophies. 

I also can’t tell if time is independent of change since we are only aware of the passing of time through discerning change or movement. Time, space, and movement have a complicated relationship. One articulation of Aristotle’s is: 

“movement is fast or slow, but there is no literal sense in which time is fast or slow. In fact, we define “fast” and “slow” in terms of time: “That is ‘fast’ in which there is much going on in a short time.”

So motion is relative to time which is defined by movement. Okay, but to measure “fast” there is a start and end point to the time in question. On the debate of the distinction between before and after, Fraassen, a Yale philosopher wrote: 

For the moment you refer to an instant, a time t, you conceive of a before and an after, a time before t and a time after t. Hence, you cannot conceive of a first instant, a time t such that there is no time before t. But what is inconceivable is impossible; hence, time cannot have a beginning.

This theory gets interesting because it begs a scientific question—whether movement has a beginning if time is based on cycles around the sun—and a religious question—if God, as a being with no start or end, created the world, then does motion have a beginning? Can we determine if time has passed if we don’t have a clock or see the sun? Yes. Aristotle says that we can tell time by the “progression of thoughts and feelings in ourselves.” Now that is an idea that resonates with me.Now that is an idea that resonates with me. Finally, how some philosophers resolve the debate by delineating between “imaginary time” and “real time” proposed by Aquinas allows us to think of time in an imaginary structure that has an undetermined start and end as a vector separate from “real time,” a universal structure of time based on the course of history. 

I think “imaginary time” is universal. One of the most transformative inventions was the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century, giving history the uniformity of time in minutes, hours, and days. I read Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space in an anthropology seminar and in it, found one of my favorite articulations of time. Time is relative to the system it is measured against. Every reference body has its own form of time. In New Haven, it’s Yale’s academic and social calendar. At home, it’s my parent’s pace of life. In Manhattan, it’s racing up a career ladder. To think of time absent its relativity gives her too much credit to be absolute, which I don’t know if it is but it certainly doesn’t feel like that. Mechanical watches don’t capture the midsummer nights that seem to fly by or the excruciatingly awkward moments on stage that seem to last for two lifetimes. By customizing the “temporal coordinates” to a more specific social reference system, we begin to understand time as something more heterogeneous and personal. Our experience with time is private, it’s unique, and it’s definitely not summed by the ticking of a clock. Often, society will impose its own universal ‘real time’ onto our own private time; in those moments, I hope this essay is a reminder to find the small things—religion, meditation, magic—to reframe time in a qualitative rather than quantitative continuous passage. 

One hour of good company can make a day feel well spent but stacking together these experiences, back-to-back, for a whole year can blur time into exhaust. There never seemed to be enough hours in day to balance school, friends, jobs, family, church. Oh, and self. Everyone tells you to live out your twenties to the fullest, roaring 20s eh? Maybe time management should be at the top of my new year's resolution but I found that chasing the idea of ‘making the most out of everything’ cut the margins out of my life. 

Last summer, a friend sent me a podcast that posed the hypothetical: imagine that you’re burnt out, trying to meet class deadlines, and running late to all your plans with friends (ha!). Now, imagine if your day magically had 36 hours instead of 24 hours—would that help? Then, would you finally make time to meditate and call your grandparents? Probably not. More realistically, would you be stressed, anxious, or both for an extra twelve hours? That’s no fun. Maybe you’d want 48 hours? As the old saying goes, it’s not an issue of quantity; more time isn’t going to fix our state of being. It’s also not about becoming hyper-efficient or cutting out all the ‘wasteful’ moments in our lives when so much joy can be found in those mundane bits. There is so much more to life than trying to increase the velocity at which we move or buying ourselves more optionality by sacrificing time. 

I learned a new dimension to time in the workplace. For two months, I sold my time, eighty to one hundred hours a week, for forty bucks per hour to a prestigious financial institution that promised to open doors to an even shinier firm. Since a young age, I was terribly slow at reading analog clocks, so my dad bought me a nice 36mm watch for Christmas last year. While I loved the old-fashioned black leather watch, I never wore it to work. While the piece matched my business casual outfits and the pristineness of the financial district, it would’ve felt wrong to wear it when my time was not mine. As I stayed in the office building decks until 2AM or walked out of a church sermon because I was ‘on-call’ for a project, I realized that I had traded one of my most finite resources for a brand in an industry that I didn’t plan to stay in and an hourly wage that was quickly consumed by the hefty price of living in Manhattan. I was robbed of my time, my headspace, my ability to learn, and my relationships with people who mattered to me. The ultimate thief of time was succumbing to the standards and expectations of a universal public time that cut off my autonomy over time and shattered my conviction and willpower. After that internship ended, I began to wear my watch everyday—even got a tan.  

Time has visited again, indelible as always. I’m a senior in college, which means I have to make many decisions shaping my first steps into ‘adulthood’.’ If I could be Alex in the Wizards of Waverly Place, I would yell “Gilesjay Timesday” and stop time for a bit. The future feels so removed that I wouldn’t mind delaying it for a moment longer. But as CS Lewis puts it, ​​the present is the point at which time touches eternity, so I guess I’m already living the future. While philosophers might not agree on the relativity or absolutism of time, I know time is irretrievable. And I need to remember that tough times never last, that is, if you keep control of your time.