time one

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.