Day 3,768 —Running with a Vest Day IX: Time—

         When I was a freshman in college, I told my Political Science professor that I didn’t believe in time when he asked us all to write something about ourselves at the beginning of the year. It was the kind of thing I used to do to call people out when I knew they were trying to do something that didn’t work.

         There were at least 40 if not more students in my class, and I knew he had other sections. I figured he would probably not read what we wrote and if he did, he wouldn’t say anything about it. So I wrote something I knew would sound crazy, “I don’t believe in time, but I won't judge you if you do.”

         It is not that I didn’t believe in time, I just didn’t believe in it as a pure thing. This was around the time when I was trying to understand god and how he could live outside of time. And now, I don’t consider how god perceives time to be super important. I think that everything on earth is temporary but infinite encompassing billions of years. What does one year or one life matter? When you compare it to the life of a volcano or a fungus or virus. A virus can live for millions of years, so does that give them more ownership of time than we have? But at the same time, it is relative, so I often wonder if the life of a fly goes by so much slower for them compared to us. If you only live a few years, I wonder how they would influence how you perceive time.

         I used this theory to explain how an insect might fight with you for minutes if not hours if they feel you’re trying to harm or move them. It is easy for people to see this as taking “forever,” but for that small living creature, that time would represent a major portion of their life.

         I am not sure where I am going with this, thinking about time and what it means now and trying to use it to explain how the present might seem pressing but tomorrow and all the other tomorrows might be pressing too.