Time feels like breathing, at least to me, something so natural and always there that I hardly notice it until I consciously pay attention. Then the feeling of time changes, because then it is linked to something I am waiting for, something I want, something I fear, etc. Then time suddenly takes on a speed, a weight, a sound ...
Is it still the time I perceive, or my feelings about what is happening during that time?
For me, this is one of the most interesting things about time: when nothing is happening (especially internally) and I am aware of this, time often seems to stand still, the minutes crawl by, and whenever I look at the clock, the hands haven't moved.
The conclusion could be: if you want to live forever, all you have to do is consciously bore yourself, then it will feel like forever :-)
But what if I don't notice that nothing is happening, that nothing is changing? Then time passes unnoticed for me – and when I look, another hour has disappeared. And what if so much is happening that I don't have time to look at the clock? Then it can pass – and later I still wonder how so much could fit into so little time.
Could time be a Schrödinger phenomenon? The moment I look, it stops and seems motionless, but when I don't look, it happily goes on its way? So I kill the cat when I look. Would that mean I can't feel time, i.e., consciously perceive it? Is that why I became an author and not an alarm clock?
Does time exist independently of us—or at least independently of the consciousness that experiences it? This is not the question of whether a tree in the forest makes a sound when it falls, even if no one hears it—at least, I don't think so.
If time means that there is something before and after and now, does that presuppose a consciousness that thinks in such terms? Would it be conceivable to have a consciousness that does not experience before, after, and now as separate states, but as a unity, a consciousness for which the connection between yesterday, today, and tomorrow is stronger than what separates them? A consciousness that sees history as a unity and does not need chapters?
I try to imagine such a perception of the world – and it only half works in theory, but I understand the idea. A consciousness that was not and will not be, but only is, everything and always, in every conceivable moment and stage of its existence. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for me to imagine: from a human perspective, such a being would be eternal and never, a paradoxical god.
But I need time to be human, to live as a prerequisite for history to emerge.
Do we construct history through our thoughts? If so, regardless of whether actively or not, that would mean history only exists on the level of the individual, at least this version of history. Then historical events would also be something like units of time: a truth that people have agreed upon, a label on the past.
Memories are not truth, but our individual version of a story. Is that why we construct them? Sometimes, perhaps—but much more often they arise from our experiences and our recollections of them.
And what happens when we no longer remember? When we forget? We fall out of time! For a while, we can still exist in the present, but then it too begins to disintegrate because we lack the foundation of our own history beneath our feet.
And without history, we are forgotten by time.
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