Your Entire Life = mcˆ2

As I was driving into work, I saw a sticker on the car in front of me that said Clark University and thought of my old friend Stacey. It’s funny that when we’re young, we have “friends.” And then we go through a wormhole or something, and those “friends” become “friends when we were kids.” I shook my head at the bizarreness of time and got why many of our greatest minds have dedicated themselves to closing the gap between how we perceive it and what it is.

To grow in their work, artists must bring their minds and bodies together in the same place in time. Without being “present,” it’s very difficult to do things undistracted, and developing a craft is impossible without the ability to single-task. I spent the rest of the drive thinking about how we experience time and wondered if Einstein’s Theory of Relativity could teach us to be “present” for more of it.

We perceive “time” merely as the relationship between “light” and “fatigue.” It takes our planet twenty-four hours to make one complete rotation on its axis, providing a perfect container to support the rest we need before the sun rises again. Sunup, sundown, sleep, wake up; for us, this is “time.”

One day on Venus is equivalent to 243 days on Earth because Venus rotates much more slowly on its axis. So, if intelligent life happened to have evolved on Venus, would that mean they would spend 162 of our days awake before needing to sleep for the equivalent of 81 Earth days? Would they not operate on circadian rhythms and perceive “time” in an altogether different way? Is there any measure of time that Venusians and Earthlings could agree upon? In 1905, we got closer to the answer when Einstein discovered that if we measure time relative only to our experience on this planet, we are not measuring it at all.

When he was twenty-six years old, as his afternoon train pulled out of the station in downtown Bern, Switzerland, Albert Einstein watched as a giant clock vanished into the distance. He contemplated that if his train were moving at the speed of light, the light particles emitted from the clock would not be moving fast enough to update him on its movement. So, from the perspective of those still in Bern, the clock would continue to tick away “normally,” and that same clock would appear to Einstein to be standing still. This variance in time is so concrete that we’ve found that human bodies will age more slowly the faster we travel through space. From this observation, he created his Special Theory of Relativity.

Borrowing Einstein’s discovery that time passes differently at different speeds, imagine that your body is an object on Earth and your mind is a second object, flitting past it at close to the speed of light. While time might feel “normal” in that mind, for every hour it spends traveling at such a speed, days, weeks, or even years could be passing in your body.

We can notice this phenomenon in a single day. We get angry about something in the morning and spend the next eight hours ruminating. “Suddenly,” it’s night, and we have “missed” the entire day, having spent it racing in the vessel of our minds while our bodies aged without us. Now, think about what would happen if you lived life at that speed of mind for more extended periods. We’ve all heard the lamentation, “I spent so many years worrying and fretting, and all of a sudden, I’m old.”

If we can slow our minds down to move at the same speed as our bodies, our lives won’t be perfect, but we won’t miss the party.