As far as I can remem­ber clearly, I have always felt bound by the flows of time. Achieve that by this time; start that then; been there, done that. By when? seems to be the all impor­tant ques­tion while doing any work — stud­ies / web design / any­thing.

We all seem to truly show that we are man­a­cled by time by  our wrist watches. The amount of free­dom left is dic­tated by that tiny lit­tle clock on your left (or right?) wrist, that big­ger one on the wall; that tiny rec­tan­gle on the mon­i­tor. Alarms and clocks are every­where — in the cell­phone, in the iPod, occa­sion­ally in key­chains. Bound by the invis­i­ble, ever-shortening chains.

Why are we all so com­pletely con­trolled by time? Why do I con­stantly feel the need to glance at my watch and see if I can relax a bit more; or if I should/have to do some more work within this much time? Always fret­ting, always wor­ry­ing; more so since I started college.

Part of the rea­son is per­haps that we are all mor­tal; but in the short term — which is as far as most of us look (at least I do) time is still as impor­tant as in the long. After all, suc­cess is sim­ply a mea­sure of how well you man­aged to use all the time you had.

Time is, after all, just another dimen­sion; the only prob­lem is that we still haven’t man­aged to go back­wards (and side­ways) through it at will; just for­ward, at the same rate as the rest of human­ity. It’s not really a sur­prise that time-machines are one of the most pop­u­lar con­cepts in sci­ence fiction.

The only way to be free of this bond, is per­haps, only by not car­ing about the pas­sage of time. Which, is much much eas­ier said than done, or even attempted. I, for one, can­not imag­ine life with­out my metaphor­i­cal steel man­a­cle which just dis­plays the length of my invis­i­ble, unbreak­able chain.