We humans have this uncanny ability to tell time and create schemes to measure its passage.

Time is our greatest ally and our greatest enemy.

We exist in it, are bound by it. We all have a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning, we haven’t much of a choice about; it just happens, thanks to our parents. The middle, well, that’s the challenge, what to do with the decades we have allocated to us; how to live a life of meaning, given the many compromises, disputes and limitations of existence. And the end, the unspoken, the terrible finality of life, the elephant in everyone’s closet, the ultimate demonstration of our powerlessness against nature’s unrelenting force. That one we speak little of, naively believing silence equates with oblivion.

No wonder people feel time is hurrying up as they age. I hear this often, people asking whether there is some kind of astronomical phenomenon going on that’s speeding up time. This time is, essentially, the duration of a day, the precise ticks and tocks of clocks. And it turns out that, at least astronomically, the very opposite is happening. Existential time, of course, is another story. To read more from MARCELO GLEISER, click here.