time

Time is a most definite and fungible thing. If I ask "do you have the time", you can tell me what time of day it is down to the exact second; if I ask "do you have time", you might answer "yes" or "no" depending on what you imagine I am going to ask you to do.

That's because time is one common commodity everyone thinks they own for free but in turn gives a value point when asked to "spend" it for some reason. Lawyers/consultants charging hourly rates for one thing, you and I saying "I don't want to waste my time on that" for another.

It is a shapeless idea made flesh by concrete events. Imagine being stationed in outer space where nothing moves and you will soon lose the sense of time. Also imagine no error ever occurs when cells in your body duplicate themselves per their DNA instructions, nor any changes (deteriorations) ever occur in your cells, that means at any given moment you are a perfect duplicate of your previous self, a timeless being you have become... Or you might as well be dead already.

Putting down time as a straight line (dimensional axis) in a geometrical diagram is in some people's opinion one crucial abstraction for the development of Western technologies. There is no concept of linear time in China but only shi (時), which means "occasions" or "moments" that people pay attention to to manage their lives around. The notion of time as interval only reached China in the 19th century, following the adoption of the Japanese translation of time as "between-moments"— (時間).

We superimpose spatial concepts onto time and create a calendar system with precise "dateline" that registers the exact point in time an event occurs, but in our human mind everything that happened in the past seemed—like a crumpled house of pancakes—to have happened "just like yesterday". Our holistic experiences of the continuous flow of the past seem to give way to ever fewer still images as our memory recedes.

A "lived time" feels drastically different from the "mechanic time" our watch says. The hour you spend at a doctor's waiting room goes much slower than the one you do at a party. A "flowing" mind loses track of time in its utter enjoyment of doing what it does best, same as the one in "transcendental meditation" that does nothing.

Time waits for no one. Only in an artificial setup—such as a ball game—or a metaphoric speech, can one call a "time-out" to suspend the pre-set event from continuing or gain a semblance of control in their mind. No one can time the stock market to make fortunes all the time, a man-made setup as stock market is, though. 

We might not live to see the end of time, but the beginning of it is seeable already. Astronomers with their telescopes can detect the first light formed after the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago—called the "cosmic microwave background" (CMB)—that scattered all around the universe today.

Like seeing the world in a grain of sand, we can live eternity in every moment of the present. The kingdom of heaven is in our heart.

https://youtu.be/pDo4kvip-cQ