Have you ever thought of how nature marks time? My gut reflex wants to say “it doesn’t,” but that isn’t really true. While we make our clocks in factories and hang them on our walls or embed them in our phones, nature itself has been marking time for eons.
It marks time in the changing of seasons, in the migration of birds and the hatching of young from eggs or the birthing of infant animals from their mothers. Time is marked by the movements of the stars across the sky, the endless revolutions upon revolutions of countless worlds in the firmament, most of which we cannot see. The universe itself may be one great clock, counting down to the day when it dissolves into disparate particles once more, all drifting out into the void, and then only ceasing to count because there is nothing left to measure, nor wherewith to measure it.
Nature marks time through the cycles of night and day and the circadian rhythm within our own bodies that tells us when to sleep and when to wake. Hunger and satiety, fatigue and rest, birth and death—all these are the measurements of the inexorable forward march of time.
None of this is standard to nature. The revolution of one world is not the same as that of another. Days and nights vary in length throughout the seasons, and even the length of a year does not conform to an exact number of days, which is why we feel the need to add an extra one every four years. No two seasons are exactly alike from one year to the next. One year, the trees bloom early, while the next they bloom late. Some die early, others live long. No two measures are quite the same, for time moves forward and does not repeat itself. Existence itself shifts and warps with every day, year, and eon. How then can a standard measure like an hour or a minute or a second be even remotely appropriate to gauge the passage of time?
How can mankind hope to mark out their lives by rough mechanisms mounted on walls or embedded into computers, when time itself is only measured by the needs of organisms or the whirling flights of planets in the firmament? No clock can remain authoritative for long, for all things must inevitably decay after the eons of time are spent and existence itself is no more. Can mankind stretch forth his puny arm and delay the seasons or divert the tides? Can he hope to turn the worlds out of their course? The ebbs and flows of nature may be ignored in favor of the cold, lifeless machine of society, but they will not be denied. They will extract their toll precisely when it is due. No sooner. No later.
It is for this reason that I intend to sleep in tomorrow.
The Astral Wanderer is brought to you by the ideas that barrage my psyche while I’m minding my own business. Share this post with your friends while there’s still time, for one day, there will be no time left and all of creation will disperse into the void before the next cycle begins. Really.