You’ve been reading this post for less than two seconds.
You might be wondering how you’ll get those two seconds
back, or perhaps why you’ve now wasted two and a half additional seconds
reading this post. My question to you would be, is that time really yours to
waste? Can one actually possess time?
The first time I attempted to manipulate time, I was in the
first grade. At the small Catholic school I was attending, we had several
recess breaks each day, one of which was one hour long. Although the playground
was nothing more than an empty neighborhood parking lot, I always seemed to
find some sort of amusement, and as a result, time appeared to move more
quickly during recess than it did during the rest of the day. For me this was a
very interesting issue, and as a six-year-old child, I had very few reference
points for the passage of time. I was determined to figure out two things: one,
why did time seem faster during recess, and two, how could I make recess
longer?
The idea of an hour, for me, was pretty abstract, and so I
equated my one-hour recess to something I knew: one episode of Star Trek. I
watched Star Trek at home, and I knew that each episode was exactly one hour
long. Before conducting any official time manipulation experiment, I first went
through several recesses normally, thinking about the plot line to a typical episode,
trying to imagine which point I might have reached in the show after show after
a certain amount of [totally unmeasured] time had passed. My goal was to be
able to predict, without the assistance of a watch, when the bell would ring to
signal the end of recess.
As expected, my predictions were way off. I couldn’t quite
seem to keep my internal clock aligned with reality, and I was surprised by the
bell during the first few experiments. So with my initial abysmal results, I
decided that running and playing tag obviously affected my perception of time.
My final, most rewarding experiment happened on a chilly,
overcast day. I remember the sky being a perfect shade of gray, especially for
the experiment I was attempting. That particular recess, I committed what most
children would consider an atrocity. In an effort to manipulate time, I decided
that I would sit almost perfectly still on the steps of the school and see how
long the recess would last. For the experiment, I allowed myself very little
leeway, and didn’t even go so far as to bring a book to read or find a friend
to talk with. I wanted to go for the extreme, because I had a theory that
recess would become impossibly long if I didn’t do anything to speed up time.
One magnificently calm hour later the bell rang, and my
experiment was a smashing success. I had mentally run through the plot of my
favorite one-hour episode of Star Trek, and I still had time to contemplate
what forever actually meant. As a six-year-old, I had unlocked the key to
unlimited (or nearly so) recess! Although I hadn’t really thought about all the
implications of my experiment at the time, I had started down a long and
interesting path in analyzing time.
