“The happier the time, the shorter it seems.” So said Pliny the Elder in the Year 105. I don’t know that I agree with this statement. Time and I have been curious companions since my teenage years. The events that are most clear in my memory are those in which I found myself most present — giving birth to my daughter and watching the passing of my mother. In those instances, I was more conscious of the here and now than at any other time in my life. My mind didn’t fly off on tangents, thoughts of what to do next, or old memories. There’s a lesson in that for me, a lesson of being completely present at all times, and not lost in my own head, as I am so wont to be.

For decades, I’ve considered myself something of a time witch. I often can slow time down if I’m late for something, though I’ve not mastered the ability to speed up time when something is unbearably long or dull. I’ve experienced interruptions in time. Like seeing someone walking into a pool at the hot springs, and then seeing them ACTUALLY walk into the pool. These kind of things are disconcerting, but not upsetting. They make me question the linear concept of time, as well as the reality of what we perceive.

Most physicists maintain that the future does not exist because it hasn’t happened yet. I know next to nothing about physics, having only been instructed in it in high school by a former nun who played the fiddle. Besides, my mind just doesn’t work that way, perhaps because of my skepticism about such things as time. Ex-Pat always said that logic wasn’t my strong suit. I disagree. Scientific logic, while provable, does not take into account the mysteries of our existence.

There are so many things that are inexplicable in this universe. Why do we recognize people whom we’ve never met before? What is the origin of those dreams that are so vivid that we wake up physically feeling an item in our hand that we were holding in the dream? What happens to our spirit upon our death?

These sorts of experiences that have no real connection to our present-day lives speak to the possibility of so much more than linear time. They suggest parallel realities, past lives, fractures in the fabric of time. Can we live in the past as well as the future? Will we someday understand the root of such mysteries? I think we must let go of our own rigidity and our fear of the unknown in order to accept such flexible realities. That’s a huge challenge for most, and not one that I would even know how to start investigating. Just like how some of us completely lose our sense of direction in some places, as if our internal compass has been tossed out of the car window (but we’ll talk about that later). For now, I’ll continue to play with time, as it plays with me.