Our Relative Time

Time is a funny thing. We always experience it only one way — forward. No matter how hard you try or how deeply you desire, you just can’t travel back in time. It is, sadly, an unshakeable law of physics. Yet the very same law tells us something that is easy to miss in everyday life — that time is relative.

Einstein, at his most brilliant, gave us the Theory of Relativity and with it, gave us a new understanding of time. While time moves only forward, it does not move at the same pace for everyone. Remember Interstellar and the scene where McConaughey’s character goes on the planet with the huge waves? They spend 1 hour on the planet but when they return to the spacecraft, it is 23 years. Both time scales, the one on the planet and the other on the spacecraft are equally true. More importantly, they are equally real.

So, if time is relative, is it a good idea to think of it in absolute terms? 3 years on the job and still no promotion? Already 35 and yet, no child? Just 21 and already a child ?! This absolute sense of time is accompanied by a lot of anxiety, unreal expectations and changes the way we view life.

Maybe, just maybe, like all the objects in the universe, we too have our own independent arrow of time. A pace that is not affected by anyone else’s sense of time but by the person we are, the place we are in and the lives we want to lead.

Is thinking otherwise denying reality? Maybe it is more useful to understand our relationship with our time than to see others’ relationship with theirs. Getting comfortable with our time and the pace of it, frees us from the shackles of absolute timescales. And as Einstein proved, that is how the universe works.