Stories within books are an illusion.
Printed images are an illusion.
Movies are an illusion.
Life is real.
How about time?
We perceive time through movement. We define time through movement. We relate time to events.
But how about the existence of time in the Universe?
We go from one point to another and we say we will reach the destination in time, or we will be late.
We tell stories about our history and we link an event to a fixed dated or period back in time. We can not change that date or that period.
We do something right now. We can change whatever we do now and do something different, but not very different, or not very far from our actual place. So we can not change time very much.
We say we’ll have a meeting at a certain date and time. We can postpone the event during the same day, the same week, or the same month... Or we can even cancel the event. So there’s a wide time margin change.
I imagine time as a long flexible blade tighten from one end until the moment that have just passed and free at the other end. The tightened end has no movement at all, the part representing the actual time has a limited movement, and the future, the far it is, the larger movement it has.
Now how about a reverse thinking: a tightened blade at the future end, and free at the opposite one?
The blade will look the other way around.
Taking those two blades and joining them together, their movement will froze. A frozen movement of time will be the equivalent of the past, or the fixed future, so there will be just moments on a scale, like coordinates on a 3D map. Time being the fourth dimension could be considered like any other dimensions. If we consider a point fixed in space, having the very same coordinates, no matter the time, the fourth dimension, time, could be tight as the previous three, so it will be like the time has stopped.
The result of combining the two blades will be a fixed blade (our conventional shape of time). Now we are looking at it like at a 2D shape from above. How about looking at it from one end? It will be a point! Yes, a point like any other 3D points in the space that we easily could imagine (with x, y and z coordinates).
What is time? Why the 20th Century was the Century of Speed? Why are we in such a hurry to solve more and more things? Is it the time, or is it all about our perception of a slippery dimension?