‘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.’ So wrote Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, more than fifteen hundred years ago. And we’re still confused… Okay, I’m confused.

When considered philosophically, you’d think it would be a relatively simple concept: I exist right now: the Present; I remember what happened to me: the Past; I don’t know what will happen to me: the Future. That is Time. It is divided into separate Magisteria like scenes through the window of a moving train. And yet… and yet the divisions seem so arbitrary. So evanescent. It’s almost as if Time were merely an all-purpose synonym for Change. A generic label.

But things happen in time, our bodies being no exceptions, so it’s difficult to ignore. We have come to prioritize those happenings as constituting Time. The intervals between events have gradually become divested of significance, although whether it is the interval, or the event that is prime could be argued -much as whether the placement of a comma in a sentence contributes almost as much to the meaning to be conveyed as the words themselves. And yet, is it really all contingent…?

Are habits -those things we do almost without thought- or the endless train of happenings the commas? Is it actually in the intervals between things where we live? Do we inhabit the interstices, and merely mark their boundaries by events -rely on things that happen in order to count? Do we live between the nodes or does reality only exist for me when stuff happens, when I am aware of what I am doing? And if so, then what about when I’m not aware? What happens to Time then? Do you see why I am confused?

And, at the risk of sounding too Cartesian, is the reality my body inhabits different from the awareness my mind tells me about? Bodily existence seems to have been issued with different rules because it is far more contingent than my mind. Too needy. Too ad hoc, and less spontaneous. It seems overly pulled by evolution and ontogeny, unable to explore new things. It straddles the intervals like a bridge. It is a scaffolded entity, constantly in a state of repair.

No, Time, for a body at least, was always thought to be continuous. Contiguity of events allows restoration and medicine discovered this. It started on its quest to heal the body, even if the mind was not always in synchrony and did not understand. But it assumed that mind was only a by-product of body. It is… isn’t it…?

At any rate, something that has often puzzled me is the difference in prescription instructions for various medications. Of course some drugs are relatively short-acting, and need to be taken frequently, say, Q6H (every six hours), or perhaps they are more potent and require a smaller, but spaced out administration, say, Q8H. That seems fairly obvious, so instructions as to how much and how frequently to take them would therefore make sense.

But suppose the directions are to take them QID (four times per day) or even TID (three times per day)? By comparison, that seems almost sloppy, doesn’t it? I mean, what is the difference…? And how much variation is permissible between the timing of every eight hours, and three times per day? What impact would, for example, a two hour difference -or even more- have on the medication efficacy? This is not meant as a criticism, but merely an exploration of time in the administration of a treatment.

And yet, even a more precise prescription of the interval does not usually state a specific time for its consumption like, say, 8 PM. Given that our bodies (and hence probably our metabolism) are subject to a circadian rhythm, I’ve often wondered whether that might make a difference in a medication’s effectiveness. An article in Nature that I ran across addresses that very issue: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04600-8?utm

‘The circadian clock is a remarkable system. A central timekeeper in the hypothalamus orchestrates a network of peripheral clocks in nearly every organ and tissue of the body, turning on and off a bevy of genes including some that encode the molecular targets for drugs and the enzymes that break drugs down. These clock genes are particularly important in cancer because they govern cell cycles, cell proliferation, cell death and DNA damage repair — all processes that can go haywire in cancer.’

Until recently, technology was unable to determine the genes involved, let alone the timing of their activation, and so chronotherapy remained on the fringe. But, ‘More than four decades of studies describe how accounting for the body’s cycle of daily rhythms — its circadian clock — can influence responses to medications and procedures for everything from asthma to epileptic seizures. Research suggests that the majority of today’s best-selling drugs, including heartburn medications and treatments for erectile dysfunction, work better when taken at specific times of day.’

Steroid levels, for example, ‘naturally cycle with the circadian clock. In the late 1960s, scientists found that the synthetic corticosteroid methylprednisolone is safer for treating arthritis and asthma if taken in the morning rather than at other times of the day. This is because the feedback loop in the hypothalamus, which controls the release of cortisol, is least vulnerable to inhibition in the morning.’ Other factors such as age and gender also seem to be important in circadicity. So is the inconvenience of the times when the appropriate genes might best be manipulated. Not only that, but ‘practical biomarkers are needed to help clinicians identify optimal times for treatment.’

There are many variables to account for, but clearly there is a growing appreciation of Time in understanding the body’s underlying physiology. There is a need to adjust not only the treatment, but also its provision in harmony with individually derived schedules that are often by no means intuitive or convenient. As if, by finding each body’s unique variations on the theme of circadian rhythm, we discover the hidden melody playing deep within.

Maybe Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali polymath who won the Nobel prize in Literature in 1913, was not so far afield after all: Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

I’d like to think we all dance in Time…