What is Time?

Just a picture taken two months ago

A few years ago, I wrote this article about how confused and how many questions I had before going to college. I was going to start a completely new adventure in my life, travelling more than five hundred kilometers from home, in a sub-tropical climate only to challenge my body that has endured extreme cold but not heat. I was then eighteen, curious and firing with excitement, ready to bring myself out to the world with the teenage motivation. I’d have imagined my college in ten thousand ways and often hoping it not to be less than stairs that opened with passwords and cozy common rooms for study, or a library with deep secrets. I must’ve idealized my college too much but I couldn’t blame because even after reaching the college and seeing what it exactly looked like, or worked, I would secretly hope for something fascinating to happen, at some point.

It’s been four years now, and this is my fifth year. And if you ask me, I’m still trying to find some decent ten minutes to think about what’s going on in my life. It feels like I’ve trapped myself into some huge mess where I have no time at all but at the same time it feels like I’m up to nothing productive. It baffles me how I transformed from this person who used to have time for everything to someone who is struggling to keep the deadlines on track.

But time is a mysterious concept. It has always been. We’re living by the science that time began with the Big Bang and before that, everything was one piece-one singular atom. Now after 14 billion years, we’re infinite number of species each with infinite unique characteristics trying to find something common in each other. So the fact that my tiny life took a leap straight from an over-fantasized world to a labyrinth of multifaceted truths is actually what feels normal.

I don’t blame anyone or anything but time. I think time rules everything on earth, the milky way or as far as light reaches. It is as powerful as it is mysterious and something that doesn’t make its existence in one predictable form, which also makes it dangerous. And as I learn that time is the fundamental of change, it is also the constant that is multiplied to all the variables in life.

My current realization of time would be how the weekend seemed like two minutes of sleep from where I wake up to go through another week of soulless submissions and deadlines. I just hope you have a better story about time than mine.