time is of the essence
I had a strange thought the other day.

What if one of us- You, me, or someone you know, decided to suddenly "give up" time. We know time as we think of it is a human construct. Animals hold no calendar. So what if one of us decided to keep no clocks, no calendars, and abide only by instinct. How long would we last?

First, we would have to give up the idea of being on time because we wouldn't know when 3 o'clock was to make that meeting. We would sleep as late as we liked, eat when we were hungry, etc. But slowly, I think, time would begin to reistablish itself.

There will always be night and day, the turning of the sun. We would begin to count the days. Slowly, we would become accustomed to the moving of the sun in the sky and we would know the hour by the light. After we knew hours and days, we would watch the moon and form a crude sort of month. By the turning of the seasons and the moving of the months, we would know that another year had passed. Granted, we would not know the first of January or Six o'clock monday morning but we would know something similar of our own. We would, invariably, return to time. Or would it return to us?

Would someone raised without the teaching of clocks and calendars (but nonetheless a thinking, modern man) come to the same conclusion? Would a "virgin" mind invent time? I would venture to guess so. And isn't that amazing?

We can't live purely without time any more than it can live without us. Time is of the essence... and its essence is human.