Time

                We’re wrong about time.

                I love humanity. I’m a humanist. I think our greatest achievements are when people really and truly do great things for the sake of doing great things and are celebrated for it. For the glory of us-kind.

                But time is a mistake.

As a guy who handles himself rather decently around the language—a bunch of curls and loops meant to encapsulate all range of feelings and deeds—I’m a bit intimidated by Math. Sure, I appreciate its rigid straight-line logic, its absolute unflinching absolutism. But, despite those who claim its universality, it’s just as much a human fabrication as language. And this is nowhere clearer than when we talk about time.

We have imposed our own Math on human experience and forced it to make sense, even though every experience we have says otherwise.

Think: the worst experience you ever had—say, that time you wet yourself in front of your Grade 4 class—was about as long as the very best summer of your life. True, the seconds and minutes and hours and days belie this, but those are the human imposition. Your experience is the truth.

Time is a human creation. It actually goes slower when you’re younger than when you’re older. I have a best friend who is twenty years older than me. I have peers who seem like children. I know teenagers who are right to consider me naïve.

Because time is a lie. As with words, we have tried to catch our understanding of this experience that is humanity and express it in a nicely-wrapped little package of digits and dials. It’s not that. Life is what we live, and time, as words, fails to express what we are living.