Leaps Through Time

Leaps Through Time

Throughout history, people have struggled to organize time. This was necessary in order to communicate ideas and achieve common goals and it seems to have worked. Only recently did I grasp how time is a completely human construct and that it changes as we do. The more complex our technologies become the more compressed is our time, until we have become unrecognizable to ourselves, in mere generations.

This all became apparent to me one day, while visiting my parents. I was casually perusing my father’s bookshelf when I came across his science book from high school. Thumbing through the pages, I came upon a picture that struck me as odd. It was an image of the Earth, but drawn in pencil. It was the first like it I’d ever seen, as my whole life the Earth has been depicted with a photograph. It dawned on me that when my father was in school, such a photo did not exist. People generally knew the Earth was round, but the concept was somehow more vague, as few had traveled very far, the cost being largely prohibitive.

I mentioned this to my father and he launched right into a story about his grandfather, who had been born in the 1800s. He said his grandfather often marveled that, while he had grown up without electricity, the telephone, television, or radio, he had just seen a man land on the moon! He told me how he was completely fascinated with the new colored photographs, especially the brand new image of the Earth from space! This got me thinking.

I knew humans had been around for about six million years and modern humans hit the scene some 200,000 years ago. Civilizations as we understand them today started organizing about six thousand years ago and remained relatively unchanged until the 1800’s, during the Industrial Revolution. Before then, folks most likely took up the trade of their parents and lived out their lives in close proximity to their place of birth. For most humans who have ever lived on this planet, the Earth was only as round as the curve of the horizon.

That’s when it started to dawn on me; human lives have become largely unrecognizable in a mere generation! For the longest time, people created calendars to organize their days based on the relatively-noticeable movement of the Moon around the Earth. The Chinese and Islamic calendars still do. The Jewish Calendar was the first to concentrate on the movements of the Sun around the Earth. It was Julius Caesar of the Holy Roman Empire that first established a twelve-month calendar, based on the solar year. Thus, it was called the Julian Calendar. Caesar had become a Christian, so he chose March 1st as the New Year, as it was nine months prior to the birth of Christ. This is how we came upon the month names; September, October, November and December, as they are seven, eight, nine and ten months away from March, respectively. It’s interesting how relics of the past remain with us in the present. In 1757, Pope Gregory determined to shift the days of the year to better compensate for leap years, giving us the Gregorian calendar that the world follows today.

However, the days of our weeks are named after celestial bodies i.e. the Sun, as Sunday, the Moon, as Monday and Saturn, as Saturday. The rest of the days are named after old gods, yet each had their planet. Tuesday was Tiw’s Day, named after the precursor to Mars, god of war. Wednesday was Woden/Odin Day, the All Father, who is linked to Mercury. Thursday, was Thor’s Day, god of thunder, associated with the newer god Jupiter, known for hurling bolts of lightning. Friday was Freya’s Day, who later became Venus, goddess of love. This struck me as strange, as the calendar doesn’t track the movements of any other celestial object, other than the Sun.

What’s more, have you ever wondered why July has thirty one days? It is because Julius Caesar was so egotistical that he wanted an extra day in his month. It was only later on that August earned it’s extra day. Can you guess why? Well, Augustus Caesar, who came to power after Julious, thought he was just as cool as him, so he wanted an extra day as well! Our modern concept of time is completely arbitrary, having little to no anchors to modern human experience. Instead, we organize our time around the egotistical whims of ancient gods and rulers. This has ushered in a period of rapid development that has far outpaced our capacity to compensate. It seems to me it is due time we reevaluate our relationship to time and create a new way of organizing our efforts. Because, while our technological achievements have brought us to the moon, we are in dire danger of destroying the Earth we live on. Perhaps a new perspective will help us re-imagine our connection to time and space.