Time Is ...

Time is a child playing at checkers.

- Heraclitus, Fragment 52


This image never ceases to bring me joy. What is more divine than a child lost in itself, oblivious to the passage of time? It gives no thought to mortality, nor even for what the next day may bring. A child both willingly and unwillingly throws itself into the object of its passion at the time. Do you remember when a leaf absorbed your very being for minutes or hours? Do you recall staring at the clouds in the sky as the sun moved across the blue ocean? To be present in the present as the tale is told to us. Oh to be like little children again!

Can we even/ever recapture such existential ignorance again? Perhaps it is the sole source of bliss on our brief foray here on earth, between voids and heavens. But the child is not the object of Heraclitus' observation; no, time itself is. And who can claim to know what time is, except for this divine quality: it is no respecter of persons. I have the same amount of time as you, as a pauper and a prince of this world. There are the same number of hours in my days as those of our king. And time wanders on, meanders, strolls, really, taking its own time, if you allow a circuitous remark. Time has no consciousness, but rather a superconsciousness, an uber-consciousness, or perhaps more accurately, an anti-consciousness. Something we cannot fathom whilst we reside deep within it.

Throw out the clocks! Turn away from the grasping! To be present in the present means nothing more or less than being here, now.

Time is a child playing at checkers.