The 60-second minutes, the 60-minute hours, the 24-hour days, the 7-day weeks, the 30/31-day months, the 12-month years, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That's basically what "time" is to us... the numbers that we see on calendars and time-keeping devices. But have you ever wondered what it really is that these things count or measure? Or better yet, have you ever asked yourself what "time" really is?

The means of telling time and saying the time, aside from differing from one civilization to another, have been undergoing some changes through the centuries. Nowadays we have what we call atomic clocks which are among the most accurate time keeping machines in the world. It's almost funny to think that here we have an "accurate" time keeping device YET we don't have an accurate time system! With the time system that we are using now, we acquire an error of more or less one day for every four years, that's why we have what we call the "leap year" where we add an extra day to our calendar. Now that would be cheating wouldn't it? Anyway, to get back to my original questions...

What IS time? What are these numbers that we see on our watches, clocks, calendars, etcetera? Technically, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years that we know of now are merely divisions of the cycles that we and this planet go through over and over again. The sun rises, the sun sets, then the sun rises again... a day has passed. That's basically it.

Time is ever present... or so we think it is or should I say we're made to believe it is and have to believe it is. BUT... is there really such a thing as time?

What if time never became what it is now? No numbers, no names for the days nor names for the months. I mean nothing. We will then be left with only the heavenly bodies to tell us the "time". As a result of that we will probably have only "day" and "night" for the times of a day, and probably the "seasons" for the times of a year (Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall). Anything more specific or more detailed than that will require an enormous amount of knowledge in Astronomy (which will be needed more in the countries in the tropic regions where there's no such thing as the four seasons).

Well, the movements of the heavenly bodies are just that, movements. And it just happens that everything moves in a circular motion/pattern, which is basically the reason why things reappear once in a while (on which we can base "time" on). Permit me to move away from reality for a while. What if the heavenly bodies were not spinning and everything out there moved in a straight infinite line at the same exact speed and at the same exact direction making everything in the sky seem motionless? How then will we be able to tell time when all you see are people growing old, trees growing bigger and other similar things? Can we say that there's "time" then (when growth is a natural phenomenon that almost all, if not all, living things experience)? It will be like telling time by watching a river flow.

Well, I guess what I've just said is an impossibility, and it may even be rediculous. I guess I can't deny reality, maybe forget about it for a while, but not deny. As long as we live and as long as things remain as they are, I guess there IS time. As I've said, whether there's really such a thing as "time" or not we have to believe it's existence. Just imagine a world without deadlines.

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