I’m not sure how often you think about time or your limited amount of it, but to me it’s a rather interesting concept.

Time, like mathematics and numbers, is a tool humans created to help them understand the world around them. As Albert Einstein once said:

“The separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, though a convincing one.”

The fact of the matter is that time is relative. Daylight saving time and leap years have made it such that the time we function by is imprecise and also inaccurate. Let’s face it: every time we’ve gone to turn the hands of our analog clocks forward or back an hour, chances are the hands have been off at least a little. Even digital clocks can differ depending on what source the clock itself was based off when it was created. And beyond the inaccuracy of the devices we use to tell time, the exact time differs across countries and across different cultures as well. Who was there when time started? No one. So no one knows exactly how much time has passed and our own concept of time is skewed. Does that make time useless? Not necessarily, since it helps us communicate with one another and organize actions.

That brings us to the following question: how do we describe the concept of time? We can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or feel time, but we need to be able to communicate the concept to others. In American English, this is often done by giving time direction.

The way we talk about time is almost as if we were talking about a long, limitless tunnel. In the “passage of time,” there are two directions: forward and backward. One direction represents the future; the other, the past. However, though we generally tend to favor designating the backward direction as the past and the forward direction as the future, the designation of direction to the future and past fluctuate.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about: the phrases “looking back” and “looking forward” are often used to talk about reflection on something that happened or will happen, respectively. You say “back then” when you’re talking about the past, and you “plan ahead” for future occurrences. In these cases, the past is behind you and the future is ahead of you.

However, you also refer to generations of people who have lived in the past as “ancestors,” or “those who came before us,” and generations of people who were born later than you as “descendants,” or “those who come after us.” In these cases, the past is in front of you and the future is behind you.

These are only a few examples of the supposed direction we give time. But clearly, we are not consistent with our designation of direction to time. What does our fluctuation say about our perceptions of time? To me, it just confirms that we don’t really have a set way of thinking about time and that time is truly relative to what we want it to be. I invite you to share your thoughts on what this means or if you think it means anything at all in the comment section.