Time flies. Or rather our experience of it does.

Speaking of time, I often wonder, what is it? Does it even exist…at least in the way we imagine, an endless and linear progression from the past to the future?

I’ve been (slowly) reading Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time”. From that book, I’ve learned that time is variable depending on how close to the earth you are. The closer you are to Earth, the slower time moves. the higher your are, the faster it moves. It’s a minuscule difference. You wouldn’t notice it. But it’s true nonetheless.

I also learned that, according to Rovelli, time—or our experience of it—is linked to heat or friction.

As Charlotte Higgins writes for The Guardian, “According to Rovelli, our undeniable experience of time is inextricably linked to the way heat behaves. In The Order of Time, he asks why can we know only the past, and not the future? The key, he suggests, is the one-directional flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones. An ice cube dropped into a hot cup of coffee cools the coffee. But the process is not reversible: it is a one-way street, as demonstrated by the second law of thermodynamics.”

Perhaps most interesting to me is Rovelli’s idea of entropy as the reason we experience time as a progression to the future rather than a more holistic circle of the future and the past.

Higgins continues, “Time is also, as we experience it, a one-way street. He explains it in relation to the concept of entropy – the measure of the disordering of things. Entropy was lower in the past. Entropy is higher in the future – there is more disorder, there are more possibilities.”

For Rovelli, time as a conception of past and future, however, doesn’t even really exist—except for as a construct in our blurred vision of reality, “If I observe the microscopic state of things, then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.”

The Buddhist conception of time seems similar, and it’s interesting that they arrived at such conclusions without the assistance of modern theoretical physics. For the Buddhist, there is only the present. The future and the past do not exist. Indeed, we are constantly remade anew in each instant. Never the same person from moment to moment. In fact there is no person at all to speak of.

Or take Christ’s odd and mind-bending claim, “Truly, truly, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I AM.” They tried to stone him for that one, but would you expect anything more from the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end coexisting—and sustained—in one being.

So many different experiences and thoughts on time…depending on the time lived in.

How funny, then, that we try so hard to control something that doesn’t even exist—or that is perhaps contained in the divine.

Another book on time that I fell in love with was of a more practical nature. Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”.

Burkeman, a former time management guru, explores how our obsession with time—and our burning desire to control it, at least in the Western conception of time—leads us to quite unhappy places.

I explore some of the implications of Burkeman’s book in my post, “Time Is Not On Your Side”.

It’s a post focused on getting clear on what’s important and letting things go.