Time, the scary monster

By Quah Paik Suan, 17, Kuala Lumpur

TIME scares me. We all know about the existing concept of time, but does time really exist?

I mean, it’s one of those non-physical entities such as love, sound and life, but it’s silent, invisible and all-controlling. Music is governed by time in the form of beats and counts, and love either fades or grows stronger with time. And in life, time basically kills us slowly.

And we have never seen this silent murderer’s physical self though we create many physical things to measure it. Love does not have a measuring unit such as seconds, minutes, hours and days, but time has all sorts of instruments such as watches, clocks and complicated machines to quantify it. For a non-physical element, time really does consume lots of materials.

Besides, it practically rules how we live. What we achieve is limited to the time we have (unless you leave things to the last minute, that is). The less time we have, the more hassled and hurried we are and vice versa. Plus, all those proverbs and sayings that tell us to seize the day and not waste time create a pretty important image of time.

And let’s not forget those goose bump – inducing love declarations uttered by star-crossed lovers that mostly speak of loving each other beyond time (heck, how does one escape time?) and how their love will never ever fade. Then there are those ‘most amazing (insert noun here) of all time’ lists that pick out outstanding things that have stood or probably will stand the test of time.

But the most terrifying quality of time is that it is completely beyond our control. We have yet to see the invention of a time machine with real fast-forward buttons and real methods to slow down the wheels of time. So far, we have been chasing unlikely solutions by looking for time portals, doorways to other dimensions and creating impossibly complicated physics formulae.

Time is scary, because it will catch up with us eventually. I can imagine myself in my mid-forties, looking in the mirror and having a sudden realisation along the lines of “Oh gosh, I’m 45 already. Half my life is gone! I’m beyond my prime!“ only to start an existentialist stage of life within my hopefully still-lively, half-old soul.

That has got to be the most powerful weapon that time has—the ability to diminish itself into just another measurable base quantity before stealing the limelight and demanding your life as a sacrifice.

Tick-tock, hickory dickory dock!

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Time, the scary monster

TIME scares me. We all know about the existing concept of time, but does time really exist?

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