TIME

“Can you see time” he asked,” its 10:45”, I replied, he asked again, “can you see time”. I stared at him, “what do you mean, I am reading time”. “Yes, you might read as an illusion, but can you see”. This conversation was part of a long discussion we had while counting stars on a very black night. It was a small group, a Shepherd, Shams of Tabriz, the blue camel, and Rambo, yes you got it right, Rambo, with swagger.

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Again, it was a long black night, with a million stars to count, with fear of getting lost in unseen clusters of the ever-expanding universe. The fire slowly shriveled, giving out the last bright force of energy, the dying warmth and you could slowly feel the coolness of desert enveloping your being or persona as the wise Athenian philosopher would immortalize.

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We drove back in the battered 1980’s manual Corolla, prized possession of Rambo, the car did move but at its own terms. Shams the thinker, the great teacher of Rumi, and Rambo the quiet man, the shepherd who would call himself, just an observer and the blue camel sitting on roof top, enjoying the drive, feeling the wind over long eyelashes. The journey ended, and it was time for Shepherd to take his flock for the morning walk, do think again of “seeing time” and Shams evaporated or just melted.

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Walking again knee deep maneuvering the lonely dunes, he thought about time, he wore an old mechanical timepiece on his hand, it predated the times of branding, was once a pocket watch, later converted into wristwatch. How many hands it passed, how many stories it has been part of, the long agonizing love poems, the tales of chivalry, the days of glory, and yet time existed, seen, or passed.

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Was it time or the notion of it, actually if you hitchhike between galaxies then you do have to drop the belief of existing time, then speed of light becomes your yardstick, well even then to jump from one galaxy to another it would take few hundred thousand light years, and yes light travels at 3*10*8 or simplified as almost 300,000 meters per second, that could be a lot or not depending what the destination is. In human basic terms we still use what the Babylonians produced a few millennia ago, so distant yet not so far, sixty minutes and sixty seconds, there are tons of theories on evolution of time, you can google it.

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Today we have evolved, with chat GTP and humanoids soon, my iPhone is more advance than a 1970’s supercomputer, that’s crazy evolution, but somehow a minute still consists of 60 seconds.