It’s a funny thing time. It can stretch on forever or be over in the blink of an eye. We are beholden to it in the modern age, and it’s not by accident. But is it natural? Were we always slaves to the order of it rather than just taking part in the process of it. Was there always an order to it? Has it always run on a cycle, a countdown with a reset date? Like each night at midnight when we ‘reset’ the day to start over. To run the simulation again and again until it eventually reduces the cycle back to zero. But on a bigger scale.

We have our time divided up and dictated, whether we like to admit it or not. The system of our whole day being split into three eights to command a separation and categorising of our time. Work time, down time, sleep time. All very ordered. For industry of course, and the working part of those hours used to be much higher and has changed over time depending on the needs of the corporations, not because of the needs of the people, although it’s painted as such.

And to facilitate the above, we have clocks everywhere. Alarm clocks to frighten, sorry, startle you out of sleep to start your work day. If you are lucky enough to not have to start with an alarm, it can only be a good thing. Your body gets to decide on what terms to start the day. But so much of our daily routine involves and revolves around time and breaking it all down by way of numbers. Clocks being integrated into most parts of your day, to wake you, get you to school, or work, clocking in and clocking out as they say. In your house, on your wrist, now on your phone. TV Programmes arranged by time slots, everything organised by time. Yet it passes us by quite unnoticed sometimes. Hasn’t the time flown by one might say. As can it drag on and seem an eternity, depending on the activity at hand.

The church also plays their part I have noticed. Bells ringing, every quarter hour, and numerous times to signify the hour change (after 1 o’clock obviously). It’s around 96 times a day I think they chime, for timekeeping purposes of course. Nothing to do with the hypnotic rhythmic tolling periodically.

As a society, we are set on a calendar (which has been changed and altered I might add, but for this we’ll go along with what we are told, with some places running on a different one). With years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. And from day dot, having this instilled in us through our childhoods and for the rest of our lives. Along with our age, which is marked by an annual ritual acknowledgement of it, and having multiple tasks, laws and expectations placed upon it.

It can also really tamper with a person’s stability and sensibility if you mess with or rearrange someone’s timeline or knowledge of it. But is that only because people are given a timeline to work within, so without that, you have no grounding or starting point. Imagine if every clock you passed was keeping a different time. And each day things didn’t have a specific reference point for anything, it seems like it would be hectic and chaotic. And perhaps it would without a different system in place. People like to have a starting point, to know where you came from, what you are doing and ideally where you are going. Time can reveal all of these things, if there isn’t a truck load of obstacles in the way and human interference. Time will tell as they say.

We know, or appear to know that time is fixed in our daily lives, past, present and future. Yet we dream and fantasise about travelling backwards or forwards through it. Capturing the secrets of the past, or to reveal the wonders and worries of the future. But the conundrum of either only being able to view said events, or of being perpetually doomed to keep trying to fix something you never can isn’t a happy one. Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t, as far as we know anyway.

Time waits for no-man they say, and it marches forth whether you are taking part or not. But that makes it sound as if time is an entity, rather than a mathematical system of numbers to calculate us into conditioning. As if we have a choice and that time is not our enemy, who is following and stalking us to our fate as we are led to believe. But more a friend, who we can walk with and will be with us to the very end. Depends on your perspective I guess. Your time is up, is another saying we have, to make us think we are a personally on the clock, that we have a set time to go. Like we are programmed to expire and do so because we believe it to be true. Who can say for sure.

It could have been as simple as night and day, afternoon and morning, I’ll never know.

(c) MKW Publishing