The Hourglass is Ticking

If there is one author that I admire, it is Jorge Luis Borges. His writing is a perfect combination of words, expressions, stories, characters, myths, and even what we do not know we do not know, but Borges is here to let us know. His stories carry such an elegance that they sound as if what he tells us has always been right in front of us.

One of my favorite writings from Borges is "El reloj de arena." I want to talk about what time is. Time carries with it all that we were, all that we are, and all that we will be. Is time real? Or, as Borges said, is it just used to measure the time of the dead?

Time is a utility. Language is a utility. Language is what is allowing me to talk about time as a utility. What would time be if there was no word for time? There would be clocks to measure time: let these be part of nature, between day and night, analog, or made of glass and sand.

We perceive time as a line, where there is a past, a future, and a present. However, clocks repeat themselves. The sun comes out every morning, the clock marks midnight every night, and the sand is trapped in the hourglass forever. The word time comes from the word temporary. Humans think about time as ephemeral, when time is, in reality, eternal. The time of clocks is a utility used to measure the technicalities of being human.

Let's imagine all of us were just thrown in a place where there is time and space (nothing else). Who are we? What do we do? Where do we go? We are now forced to focus on how to exist. We start realizing that time and space travel together, and that along this journey there are infinite possibilities to be.

One day we discover we will die, and that will be the end of our time as we know it. Now we have finite possibilities to become something. We no longer focus on the how of our existence, but on the what. Time is now our death sentence and it puts a lot of weight on our shoulders. What is the truth, then? Are we a consequence of time, or vice versa? The truth is that it is all true.

Time is heavy. Time allows us to exist in space and space allows us to exist in time. What we do, we will carry with us on the journey of time. Sand is eternal and it still falls inside an hourglass (that is extremely human). Time gives us certainty because we have made it a utility. Everything that is not a utility is fiction, and time outside our humanity is just that. We are right now because of what we were in the past, and we also are right now because of what we will be in the future. Time is just a thread of sand that is in constant creation and destruction.

This is no conclusion to worry about. All that we do has a weight on the universe (that is made of time and space). The pressure is on. What will you do with your existence now? Whatever it is, know that you can start changing the course of (literally) everything. You can get scared, or you can embrace it.