About time

Time is not linear. It isn’t the repetition of anything constant. Every moment is different from above. And are different because body conditions, which are what give the cadence of our existence, so are: time-varying. Mechanical watches count has nothing to do with durations and sequences of personal experience. Watches add constant units without entity. The seconds, minutes, hours. A simple counting: one, two, three, four, five, six... Go adding something that has no reality, seven, eight, nine... A linear and empty footage we impose on events and experiences in trying to get there in a dimension analogous to space, certainly by the illusion of marking what we feel, what we think (the real 'real time') with signs that perhaps might contain our lives. A bubble fueled by its permanent dissatisfaction.

Linear time exists only the moment we try to put life in a a grid. The calculation of time is a mental content as any. The moments of experience that occupies the clock are not occupied by other contents of the infinity of possible thoughts. It's just a thought. That's it. But when we repeatedly submit to the marks clockwise, we are forced to neglect what would happen frank and spontaneous. But it is only a moment. Our being and our thinking flow apart from empty counting (even flow apart from our own will!).

The mechanic of watches is stupid and opposed to natural thought, because is pure routine succession of fractures of feelings, dreams and cogitations of people. It is the superposition of millimetered emptiness to mind filled with content that continuously flows fluctuating, unpredictable, indosificable. Time of clock is a simple sequence (endless) of ruptures and interferences, which we usually resign ourselves hopelessly.

Josep Pla pointed in the preface of Humor, candor...: "One thing is physical time, which clocks measure and divide in a mechanical way and with calculations of which calendars are built and are established divisions of  years and centuries, and another thing  is the succession of time through the duration of our body. To  clocks  all hours are equal, to our body, all - or nearly all - are different. Some are long, others less, there are some that are empty, others full, there some that are gray and poor, others likely to create the flash of a moment, an unmistakable, unforgettable real time. On the perfectly accurate succession of the hours of watches, on the confusing flow of psychological hours the moments are produced, that are the jabs that projects time on our body. These instants influence our lives in a decisive manner. They are the intersections of the fabric with which the Fates weave our lives.”

Indeed, there are very long hours and others very short, there are some that are full of content and are successful and others are empty and boring, there are mediocre and unproductive and others just the opposite, not because we want to or we decide it, but because they simply happen, without really knowing why. This is the "formless and confusing" becoming of psychological hours. It is a becoming that we don’t know how to grab, which has not a specific form, which does not obey to minimally defined or stable durations or guidelines, even without repeated defined cycles.

The inability to predict our own personal existence, the absolute lack of control we have on it, is manifested in this temporary inconsistency, so far from the uniformity of the mechanical hours. There are hours or moments of intense and absorbent mental activity, which passed very quickly, it is true. Other moments are totally bored, we're not able to mentally prepare anything. Without intervention of our will at all.

The vast majority of times, much to our regret, are an "overwhelming mediocrity," writes Pla. Just out above them, fortunately, there are some moments of illumination, bright, which we believe have a decisive influence on our lives, but, despite they possibly set the direction of our personal existence, also escape, like other moments, of any pretended control. Well fate of oneself is not in his hands but unknown: a kind of unique 'projections' that takes 'time' on our body, says Pla, which would be final and determinant of our existence, as knots with which the Fates weave our fate... These moments are rare, very rare, and are what we say: bodily and mental reactions to an unknown species of 'time', more intense than the majority, deeper, reaching more credibility and weight of personal meaning than the others, and is with them with which we create the most solid of our individual reality... These shining hours of our existence, however, also show, sooner or later, as a succession of pure pretexts, with which we certainly had the illusion that they were the solid foundation of our life at the time, but finally they lead to disappointment, because basically they are just a bluff, a mental elaboration as another, and over time we become aware.

They deflate completely. These 'brilliant' hours are made of ideas and convictions personally heartfelt, true, but they are illusions after all, psychological artifacts different of objective reality, which always goes through independent pathways. They are highly developed thoughts (from sensed and repeated) that have guided our actions, but that, over time, are as plain excuses for mistakes, big mistakes we made along our existence: "successive pretexts of disappointments and unedifying adventures" says Pla.

The frames of the most elaborate personal ideas just rid themselves, like a huge martingale with which we have been fooling ourselves, without being aware of it. Over the years, the notorious ideas our biography are only a feeling of disappointment, even a personal testimony of our own foolhardiness (unconscious at the time).

 Pla can not say more with so few words: "In the period that we has played live we have had moments of all kinds. We have past dangerous hours. Many, many hours of overwhelming mediocrity. Scintillating hours have been extremely rare - successive pretexts of disappointments and unedifying adventures."