I wonder what grasp I’d have of time without watches and calendars to pin it down, measure and divide it. Tenuous at best would be my guess.

For example, at church last Sunday we had some old friends return for a visit (hat tip to Roger, Janine and family). I was wondering how long ago they’d moved from Hither Green down to Hastings and so I asked Roger if it had been six months already. “No,” he calmly replied, “… two years”.

It’s even worse than that! Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is a set of web development technologies called AJAX. I’ve been wanting to give them a try ever since reading an online article a long time ago (my subjective, internal clock). I’ve finally been trying it a little this week and bought a book on the topic when I was in London yesterday. It turns out that this article was the seminal contribution in coining the name that is now being used and that I can’t have read it before mid-February last year.

Or maybe time is like that, fluid and amorphous, and calendars and clocks are merely useful illusions as we try to navigate this invisible dimension. It might move in a consistent direction but, as it flies, it swoops and soars!

Tags: time, fourth dimension, past