Have You Ever Eaten Time?

Time is one of life’s great mysteries. What exactly is it? When did it begin? Why do we seem to have a limited supply of it? What is it worth? Why does it pass differently when we are asleep?

I think of sleep as a strange form of time travel. We close our eyes at night and if we are lucky, we open them in the morning 6–8 hours later without really seeming like much time has passed. Even people who have been in a coma for years report this suspended state where time is not experienced while they were unconscious. Many science fiction stories use this as a way to endure long trips to other places by placing travelers in a deep sleep. And if you’ve ever fallen asleep in a car you’ve experienced a mini version of this, miraculously beaming yourself into the future and arriving at your destination. What exactly is going on here?

Almost everything we do in life is measured in time. Miles per hour. Beats per minute. Dollars per hour. Flight duration. We follow time schedules for sleeping, working, meetings, farming, traveling, etc. We arrange our lives on a timeline for events big and small. And in the end, our lives themselves have a beginning, middle and end—on a timeline.

We use time as a punishment, i.e. doing time, in such a manner that we limit a convict’s freedom with imprisonment for a proscribed term, in the most extreme, a life sentence. But we make sure they experience (do) the time and they can’t simply sleep in suspended animation until released, skipping the unpleasantries of imprisonment. Even if we did, they would find that a portion of their allotted Life Duration had been subtracted by society, irretrievably. Of course, nothing usually prevents one for using one’s time in prison for betterment, reading and other sorts of things which teaches us a lesson: Make the most of your time no matter where you are when it is passing. The same time will pass no matter what.

Time is irretrievable for the most part. Even the wealthiest person of extreme means such as Steve Jobs, still comes upon that moment where not a single second further can be purchased. No matter how long the vacation, it comes to an end and often seems short. Or perhaps a delicious meal you don’t want to end but end it must. And this brings up one of the strangest things about time: Once it has passed, it becomes more like an ephemeral dream and only lives in our memory and doesn’t measure out the same way. How often we say about the past, “It seems like only yesterday!” when many years may have passed. Maybe the Aborigines of Australia are right and so is the song “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

So much time goes into every single thing we see and do. We are not usually aware of it and perhaps it doesn’t matter that a bit of light we are seeing took 2 million years to bubble to the surface of the Sun and then 8 minutes to hit our eyes. The light we see with, that warms our world and that grows our food is ancient. Physicists say that a photon traveling at the speed of light, because of Relativity, has no time passing. It is frozen in time yet rushing at maximum velocity through space. How strange is that? What keeps it moving? Yet we are bathed in light all day and hardly notice this paradoxical thing that has happening at light speed all around us. If a photon hits some matter it may be reflected or may be absorbed. Where did it go? Theoretically, it’s merely converted to another form of energy inside an atom which acts as as a sort of “photon battery.” Then one day it might be released and emitted back out (unless it hit a black hole), instantly resuming its “flight” at the speed of light in some direction. Is it a brand new photon or the same one? Did it die or go to sleep and was reborn? Even black holes have a strange Hawking radiation that shoots photons out so they don’t seem to exactly die there either. A bit of a miracle if you ask me, these photons. And each photon has a certain frequency or what we call color even though most of them are not visible—from radio and microwaves to visible to X-rays and above. That’s pretty strange, right? A unique thing hurdling through space with a certain unique frequency and energy level that “experiences” no time passing.

Einstein discovered that matter and energy are different states of the same thing. Matter is sort of a frozen energy locked into a swirl of electrons and protons and subatomic particles. And atoms are miraculously stable. This is due to the fact that protons have a half-life of 10³⁴ years. No human can truly comprehend such a duration which is astronomically longer than the age of the known Universe—and that’s only a half-life! We routinely encounter rocks that are billions of years old and gold rings containing gold even older. And this brings me to my main theme, food.

What are we really eating when we eat food? How does it amazingly change into “us” inside our bodies? And how does it change our time? Yes, we eat veggies, grains and meat and drink water and various beverages but all of those are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms. So they really could list the same ingredients on any package—100% atoms!

And the atoms we eat have been around for eons, freshly reconfigured by Nature and chefs into something we enjoy as food with flavors and nutrition. Thank God for this reconfiguration because eating pure elements would be awful I’m sure. But let’s not forget that our food is made of these immutable ancient bits of the Cosmos because it’s really pretty cool if you think about it. It takes time to grow a plant (and lots of photons and water too) or an animal. We take time to grow ourselves. If you don’t get enough food and water, you will die so in a very real sense, food gives us time. So does breathing those essential oxygen atoms! In a sense, air is food for the lungs. Paradoxically, too much food or toxic foods (the worst being poison) can subtract time from our lives. Something about all that time that exists in atoms and grown things is imparted to our lives in a mysterious way, so next time you bite into that warm slice of delicious pizza, pause for a moment to reflect on this beautiful eternal relationship between food and our precious time on Earth.

And that, my friends, is food for thought!

Learn more about time in my book at Wealth And the End of Money