“The time for action is NOW!” he cried, and the people cheered. Someone called out to their leader from the crowd, “Sir, shall we convene in the public square in thirty minutes or so?!”
“Nay. Let us rest tonight and meet there tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.”
The way in which we perceive the passage of time permits us to feel that there is a well-defined moment, which we call ‘now’, that belongs neither to the past nor the future, yet depending on the context in which the word is used, part of the period we call ‘now’ can be seen to clearly belong to the period we call ‘the past,’ which is well defined; all completed events exist in the past, and to a period we call ‘the future,’ which we can only speculate about. If an event is what we are focusing on, information about when it takes place is secondary. If you mention an event in passing, and I ask the question, When will the event take place? you can respond in one of three ways, “Actually, it already happened,” “Actually, it’s happening now,” or “It will happen tomorrow” (or, any other time in the future). If we are focusing on time periods, then information about events taking place within those periods becomes secondary. I might ask you, “What did you do last night?” To this you might respond, “I sat on my front porch and drank wine.” If I call you on the phone and ask, What are you doing now?” you could say, “I’m sitting on my front porch and drinking wine.” Or, if I ask you, “What are you going to do tonight?” for the same activity you would say, “I’m going to sit on my front porch and drink wine.” In the second case, sitting on the front porch and drinking wine is only one of the things you are doing ‘now’; you are also talking to me, breathing, looking at your surroundings (if your eyes are open), as well as several other possible activities. Of course, when I asked you the question, What are you doing now? I only wanted to know which activity, out of all of the ones you were engaged in, was of primary interest to you at that moment.
‘Now’ exists for us as a somewhat well-defined period only in reference to events which have begun but are not yet completed. Events themselves are arbitrarily defined by us, and this compounds our confusion about the time we call ‘now.’ Without referencing any events, is there a way of identifying ‘now’? Of course there isn’t; there isn’t any such thing as ‘frozen’ time in our experience, so we shouldn’t think there exist fixed points on our usual notion of a timeline. Sure, there are approachable ‘limits’ that represent to us ‘snapshots’ in time, but if we mentally place our concept of a timeline (one-dimensional and continuous, starting from zero) directly above the positive-real number line, we are forced to admit that if we allow for stoppages along our timeline path of traversal, then the positive-real number line and the timeline become indistinguishable. Once we start traversing the timeline, we have to establish the rule that there can be no stoppages along the way until our trip is over. And if we were to add another timeline above the one we were traversing and allowed no stoppages on it ever, we would see that even when we ended our experiment on the first timeline (end of the trip), the traversal of the timeline above it would continue. So, if you tried to mark the moment ‘now’ by stopping the trip along the first timeline, you would be speaking falsely if you were to say, the time now is XX:XX because the second timeline (above the first), in which stoppages are not possible, is the truest representation of the 'reality' of time as we know it.
