Time (and Greece)

You know that feeling when you sit on a couch, and it’s a lot cushier than you expected, so you end up sinking down way further than you thought you would?

That’s how I feel about time while traveling through Europe. And I’ve been wondering how to possibly fathom the measurement of time.

***

Let me explain.

Some of the oldest things that I have ever encountered in America have been my university (established 1851), the famous founding documents in DC (written 1776), and the woman I saw at the gym every day (honestly don’t know).

In Europe though, and especially in Greece which I visited last week, history dates back much further, into this strange land called “B.C,” which I haven’t previously encountered outside of an educational context. Aka other than in some dry required world history classes in middle and high school, I’ve never experienced objects IRL that are thousands of years old.

I often find it difficult to comprehend the amount of time that such entities have been preserved for. Like the cushy armchair scenario, my mind sinks down into depths way further than it expects to.

While wandering the 4th-2nd BC architecture in Athens last week, I often asked myself questions like —

What does “2500 years old” actually mean? What significance does time award otherwise commonplace objects? How can the mind measure such periods of time?

Naturally, such inquiries reminded me of this song: Seasons of Love.

If you haven’t heard this rightly overplayed musical hit from Rent before, the premise is that singers question how to measure a year. Is it…

“In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles
In laughter, in strife…?”

Eventually they get to the cheesy answer of measuring time in love (duh), but the song got me thinking. How would I measure 2500 years?

(My particular education may have shaped my internal dialogue.)

Biology-trained mind: We’ll use an average of 3 generations per 100 years — lifespans were shorter back then — so that’s 75 generations ago, only. Meanwhile, Lucy existed 3.2 million years ago.

History-trained mind: In immense numbers of wars, leaders, and facts you don’t like to memorize but that make good dinner-party points.

Philosophy-trained mind: Time is just a human construct?

And on and on it went…

I didn’t have my answer until by the end of the trip from personal experiences, I came to a subtle realization…

Time is subjective. The mysterious force is speedy or steady depending on what you’re doing with it. Aka quick when you’re sharing life with a loved one, and sluggish when you’re waiting for that loved one. Swift in a book you enjoy, and dreary in a book on chemistry.

The week I spent in Athens with family hurried by quicker than time usually moves, because for me, family-time is the most valuable kind of time. While the week accelerated by, every moment in the day loaded itself with significance and slowed its pace in my memory. (And thus my daily journal entires were accidentally 3–4x longer.)

2500 years is nothing, merely a blip of evolutionary significance from some perspectives, and the same amount of time is everything, billions of vibrant lives, from other viewpoints.

Whether a period of time is a snapshot or an epoch, I’ve come to the hypothesis that time’s meaning lies in the eyes of the beholder. The same minute, or hour, or century can be a little or a lot to different people — just depends what perspective you’re measuring by.

For me? I usually measure time by the people I’m spending it with.

Until next TIME. ;) -N

p.s.- Surprisingly I’ve noticed we use the word “time” a lot in language. After I learned the translation, “Zeit,” in German, a disproportionately large number of things made sense. Try to count how many times you say time in a day!

p.p.s.- I spent most of my Greece trip just enjoying with family and so I won’t be writing another blog post on the trip, but if there’s any 2 things to take away from the country, it’s that — 1. Greek hospitality is a real thing, exactly the way Homer described it. 2. Walking in a town of Greek letters made me feel like I was in a sorority and in a math problem at the same time — the culture has influenced more in my life than I had realized, from the trivial to the grand.