“I don’t know how it got this late.” I said to my dog. “Well,” I continued, “I do know. I worked late, and I’ve been reading…” But then I stopped. I stopped because I realized that neither of those, or any of the other excuses we give for “how time flies” have anything to do with “how it got this late”. They’re merely how we came to not notice the passage of time to this point. But we have absolutely no idea how it passed. Some scientists have theories that describe its passage but not the real how or why of it. The energy of the Big Bang must be nothing in comparison to the energy required to move everything in all the universes forward through time. And yet, we sit here, not just ignorant, but not even noticing this force that is exerting an obscene amount of influence on our lives. It’s like someone has launched us from a cannon strapped to the back of a rocket while we continue to discuss the movie we saw last weekend as if we were calmly sitting on a park bench. And even that… even that metaphorical park bench is on a planet rotating at 465.1 m/s at its equator, 18 1/2 m/s around a sun, that is itself hurtling away from the center of our universe, and somehow we delude ourselves into thinking we’re stationary upon it. And all of this is nothing, nothing, to the force that moves us through time. I see two possibilities, although I’m sure there are more: 1) time is an incredible pushing force, and maybe the reason we can’t travel back in time is because we can’t overcome its inertia. I read a theory once, that went something like this: if you had a rod that was infinitely long and infinitely dense, that you could get spinning sufficiently fast, and then spiraled a space ship around it, the ship would be able to travel back in time. Now, I am woefully ignorant of physics, and quantum mechanics, but that sounds a lot like expending energy to overcome an opposing force. 2) all time exists in one instant so infinitesimally fine we don’t have words, concepts, or even brains capable of encompassing it. To me a two dimensional plane, with no thickness at all, is still infinitely thicker than the size of an instant with all time. If all time exists in an instant, then maybe we are just creatures whose way of processing it is to have created a linear perception of it. Maybe those days that seem to fly by in a blink really do. We know that if you travel fast enough time flows more slowly for you, like astronauts coming back to earth only to find that the time they spent away from us was seconds shorter than the time we spent waiting for them to come back. Maybe, those days, where so much happens so fast, that go by in a blink, go by in a blink because so much happened so fast. If all time exists at once, and it is merely a perception that we’re traveling through it one slice at at time, then who is to say ones perception doesn’t actually move them through it faster? I mean, when the astronauts land it’s not like someone went in and cut out seconds of their life. Somehow they end up with us at the same place in time, and yet they got there sooner than the rest of us. I think the physicists can prove me wrong on that theory, but isn’t it a wonderful one to try and wrap your head around? Regardless of how time works, or why time works, it concerns me that we are so utterly oblivious to a force that affects us so completely, and with such disregard. We give it lip service, we speak as if it’s this obvious thing we all understand, but we haven’t a clue, and I, like you, have no idea how it got this late…