musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Some relish the saltiness of Time


There are some things that have always filled me with wonder: the flash of colours in the garden as a hummingbird hesitates in a sunbeam, then disappears leaving only memory in its wake; the slow patient lap of waves from who knows where arriving as guests at the door of a tiny beach; the worried cry of a raven lost in a mountain’s woods, followed a few seconds later by the relieved answer from his mate.

But, as I begin to wave the seasons off like old friends I may never see again, I’m beginning to realize that many of the markers we use to measure Time are simply how we have evolved to measure it. Only a limited duration is allocated for our calibrations, so we have been forced to shrink the world into digestible segments. In the course of a normal day, there is little need for us to appreciate the pattern on a hummingbird’s wings as it hovers, and less use still for us to expect to see the 75 year appearance of Halley’s Comet in the sky more than once. The fairy-tale Goldilocks seems to have understood how we usually prefer things to be: not too fast, and not too slow -just right, in other words.

We have evolved to understand time in segments that are relevant to our life spans: being aware of things lasting shorter than a second, say, or longer than a century, may have had minimal value for our ability to survive. Not so, perhaps, for those organisms with vastly different temporal kitchens -their clocks are set differently than ours. It would make sense, then, that time, and the appreciation of its passage by any given organism would be related to the average life span of its species. Time -and reality itself, I suppose- must surely be a different thing to a tree that lives for hundreds of years, compared to a mosquito’s brief lodging on the earth.

So, maybe it’s my inner neurological tangles, or simply my inability to think of more profound things, that have resulted in my fascination with how the world might be experienced by non-human organisms -their Umwelten. I got a taste of this inside a short essay by Nicholas P. Money, a professor of biology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He contrasted how humans tend to experience the world second by second in an ever-flowing present, and yet, ‘while seconds might be accessible… whole minutes are elusive. We note their passing as soon as they have gone, rather than accompany them in their flow. Longer intervals are likewise remembered rather than encountered, glimpsed like towns receding in the rearview mirror during a road trip.’ A wonderful description I think. https://psyche.co/ideas/a-vast-thrilling-world-of-nature-unfolds-outside-of-human-time

But this is just the kind of temporal reality that fits our needs, of course. To be aware of longer, or shorter intervals might well be interesting, but from a survival point of view as we evolved, just unnecessary icing on a cake whose recipe was still in flux, but not yet finalized. Not yet fully baked.

Still, it makes me wonder whether a mayfly, in its one or two day aerial liberation from its start as a longer-lived aquatic larva, would see this brief existence as a long-awaited graduation (albeit for procreation only), or as the frenetic end of an existence to which it had no doubt become accustomed. Would time for it be measured differently in the two domains?

Or, in this obviously anthropomorphic wondering-experiment, consider a tree in a large forest which would normally live for centuries, say. If it were able to apportion time in relation to the average life expectancy of its kin, and where whole seasons might be equivalent to minutes, or maybe hours for a human, what would time feel like? Would a bird building a nest in its upper reaches, or a child swinging from its lowest branches, even register?

It’s silly to ask questions like this, perhaps, but I’d like to think they are suitable for a member of our own species as his allotted time begins to flag. As the various boundaries of Nature blur, everything he encounters seems to exhibit a type of sentience, if not an overlapping agency with his own. Surely everything compares its allocated existence to others of its species, it’s duration -unless shortened by accident or illness- as appropriate. I do not expect to live as long as a tree, nor as briefly as a mosquito, so I am not surprised when I don’t. I measure my time accordingly and feel blessed if I exceed the average, and cheated if it is unduly shortened. At any rate, it is the length of my life that I judge to be the gold-standard of existence, but I suspect that others of my kind have serious doubts as to how many other species might be able to judge whether the span of their lives are appropriate. In fact, I doubt that most people are willing to cede that kind of intelligence to any of Nature’s other nations.

Still, there are things that most organisms exposed to them, seem to be able to sense: the changing seasons, for example. Bears hibernate in winter, trees drop their leaves and redistribute their resources, and as spring approaches, mating occurs, eggs are laid… It is a way of marking temporal passage if individuals are able to exist that long. For those who don’t, there are always the days as flags, the succession of light and dark. To think that we are the only creatures who appreciate time is naïve.

What is Time, after all? I’m fond of quoting St. Augustine’s reply: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’ Maybe Nature is like that: experienced yet indefinable. Time just is, and not knowing more about it does not make it less valuable. We are what we experience, and what we are allotted is what we experience. Even Goldilocks knew that…

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gozzter

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