What is time? The question sounds simple, yet it is one of the deepest mysteries humanity has ever faced.
We all speak about time as if it were obvious. We measure it with clocks, celebrate the passing of years, and complain that it moves too fast or too slowly, but have we ever paused to ask ourselves: Does time really exist outside us, or is it a framework invented by the human mind to make sense of change?
When I sit with my grandchildren, hours pass like minutes.
When I wait for important news, a single minute can feel like an hour.
If time is something fixed and objective, why does our experience of it vary so dramatically?
Science itself has not settled the question.
In everyday life, we imagine time as a river flowing from the past to the present and then to the future.
However, since Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, the view has changed.
Time is not absolute. It depends on motion and gravity. In fact, past, present, and future may not be separate at all, but rather parts of a single fabric known as space-time.
Some physicists and philosophers go even further. They argue that the past still exists, and so does the future.
They suggest that our entire lives may already be laid out within a four-dimensional universe, like a complete film that already exists, and we experience its scenes one after another.
But if that is true, who is watching the film? And where does our sense that time passes come from?
Perhaps this is where the problem begins.
We often confuse two very different things: What exists, and what happens.
The tree standing before me exists. A falling leaf is an event that happens.
A person exists. Childhood, youth, and old age are things that occur during one's existence.
So what about time itself? Does it exist? Or is it simply our way of describing the changes that happen to things that exist?
Perhaps time is like music.
Does a symphony exist completely within the written score? Or does it truly exist only when it is performed?
The score contains everything: the beginning, the ending, and every note.
Yet music becomes music only when it is heard.
Perhaps the universe is similar. Perhaps reality contains all possibilities, but time is born when consciousness moves through them.
I do not know the answer, and I do not believe anyone truly does.
I know one thing: We do not all live the same time.
A child lives in a different time from an old man.
Someone in love inhabits a different time from someone waiting anxiously.
A happy person feels time flying by, while a grieving person feels it barely moving.
Perhaps that is why clocks are not enough to measure life.
We do not measure our lives by the number of years we have lived, but by the moments in which we truly feel alive.
So, does time exist outside us? Or does our consciousness create it?
Is the universe a gigantic clock ticking since the Big Bang? Or is time simply the language the mind uses to arrange memories and dreams?
I do not know.
The older I become, the more convinced I am that the question may be more important than the answer, and that the greatest mysteries of the universe are not distant stars or black holes, but that strange feeling that makes us say every morning: “Another day has passed,” while we still do not know, with certainty, what it is that has actually passed.
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*The writer is a physician and a former head of the OB/GYN Department at Cairo University’s Medical School.
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