The Invisible Flow of Time

The Invisible Flow of Time

The passing of time is sometimes described as the ‘invisible flow of time’. Such a metaphor immediately conjures up the idea that time can flow at different rates, i.e. it can speed up and it can slow down.

I’m not talking here in a science fiction manner, where people can travel backwards and forwards in time, but in the sense of the perception of those who experience time.

For the purposes of this essay I’m going to propose that the speed of time is dependent on the observer, i.e. two people might experience the same ‘event duration’ to be significantly different. For example, if I hate watching football, and my wife loves watching football, then an hour in front of the television watching the big game will pass much slower for me than it will for her.

An eminent psychologist – with a name you will be unable to pronounce, and I could not correctly spell – captured this with what he described as the process of ‘flow’ which is characterised by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Hence, if I am absorbed in writing this essay then time will pass much quicker than if it held no interest for me.

There’s another way that the perception of time can differ and that relates to elapsed time, e.g. for a five-year-old child a year equates to 20% of their life and for me as a sixty-year-old that same year equates to 1.6% of my life. Is it any wonder that time seems to be speeding up for me?

Of course, time is made up of three discrete yet intimately related states, the past, the present, and the future. The problem with these three states is that although they are all on the same continuum, they elicit very different responses in us as human beings.

Firstly, the past has gone, it is no more – in the words of John Cleese it "has ceased to be", "bereft of life, it rests in peace” - although I’m sure historians would deny that the past is not a living, changing entity.

Nevertheless, the past no longer exists in the same sense as does the present – which can be described as the ‘progress of existence’, which is an irreversible succession from the past.

One of the comforting things about the past is that it at least gives the impression of order, i.e. I can have a pretty good go at describing it and at the very least giving a reasonable account of what happened, putting things into some sequence and making consequential connections between one event and another.

The problem with the future is that it defies any attempt to accurately predict events to the same extent, as when I describe events that have already taken place.

If then, the future grows out of the present we have a very short horizon to see what will happen before events become much more uncertain and ambiguous. Whereas, the past was characterised as giving the impression of order, the future is much more given to a ‘lack of order’. Borrowing from the world of physics such a phenomenon is known as ‘entropy’ where order or predictability gradually declines into disorder.

That is not to say that the future always turns out to be different from what we expect – just that it is radically different from the certainty of the past.

From a psychological point of view this ambiguity can stimulate a fear of the unknown, which leads us to take actions which are neither logical nor necessary.

In this current crisis, caused by Coronavirus, it is this fear of the unknown that is driving so many illogical behaviours – which are logical when compared with what people have known in the past. For example, for the last few decades I have been able to go to the supermarket and buy whatever provisions I require. All of a sudden that predictability of the past has been interrupted – my confidence in the future, which I thought would simply replicate the past has been fractured. My response is to behave in a manner that solve