On 'Time'

Opening the question

Someone asks, “What is time?” and I respond: “Time is an obeisance to the past, crafted to measure the metaphysical gap between self, story, and sustainability over biological experience.” This immediately frames time as:

  • An act of deference or bowing (“obeisance”) toward what has already happened.

  • A crafted tool rather than a neutral backdrop.

  • A way of reckoning the distance and tension between who we are, the narrative we live in, and the problem of enduring meaningfully through a finite life.

This “answer” is less a definition and more a compressed worldview, in which time is a ritualized, sense-making practice of beings who know they are mortal.

“Obeisance to the past”

Calling time an “obeisance to the past” suggests that whenever we talk about time, we are in some way acknowledging the authority or gravity of what has already occurred. The past becomes something before which we bow, because it sets the conditions for the present and constrains what is possible in the future. This echoes traditions where time is tightly tied to memory: to speak of time at all is to honor, fear, or grapple with what has been, whether in personal biography, collective history, or cosmic evolution.

The nuance rests in that you are not only saying “time tracks the past,” but that our attention to the past is itself a kind of reverence. Calendars, anniversaries, and histories become rituals of obeisance; even regret and nostalgia are forms of bending toward what cannot be changed.

“Metaphysical gap between self, story, & sustainability”

In the middle of that sentence, time becomes an instrument built to measure a “metaphysical gap.” A gap that is threefold:

  • Self: the immediate, lived sense of “I” — the subject of experience in the present.

  • Story: the narrative thread that stretches backward (memory, history) and forward (plans, projections). Philosophers from Augustine to contemporary phenomenologists emphasize that human time-consciousness is narratively textured: we live as beings stretched across remembrance and anticipation.​

  • Sustainability: not only ecological or social sustainability, but the question of what can endure — identity, relationships, cultures, ecosystems, values — under the pressure of change and mortality.

By calling this gap “metaphysical,” it is indicates it's not simply a physical distance; it is a distance in meaning. Time, in this view, is crafted by consciousness as a way to measure and negotiate the mismatch between how we feel ourselves to be, the stories we inhabit or inherit, and the desire to remain or flourish over it, despite limits. This resonates with philosophical accounts where time is not just a clock but the structure of existential concern and care.

“Over biological experience”

The final phrase, “over biological experience,” grounds the whole statement in the fact that our sense of time is layered upon biological processes such as aging, circadian rhythms, and mortality. Chronological and bodily time give a substrate — cells divide, bodies age, ecosystems cycle — but the meaning of time, in your formulation, is something humans lay over this substrate.

This distinction parallels views that differentiate physical or chronological time from psychological or existential time: the former is counted by clocks and physics, the latter by memory, expectation, and value. This sentence suggests that the human mind takes these biological constraints and spins from them a metaphysical apparatus — “time” as experienced — in order to navigate life as both an organism and a storyteller.​

Context, lineage, & nuance

This line sits in a recognizable philosophical context, while still being distinctively of my authoring:

  • It echoes Augustine, who famously noted the elusiveness of defining time and described human temporality as a stretching of the soul across past, present, and future.

  • It aligns with Heidegger’s emphasis that being human is to exist as fundamentally temporal, with the present only intelligible through its relation to what has been and what is projected.

  • It has an affinity with Krishnamurti’s distinction between chronological time and psychological time as the distance between “what is” and “what should be,” where time is bound up with comparison, desire, and fear.

However, my statement adds a particular accent: reverence (“obeisance”), narrative (“story”), and endurance (“sustainability”) as explicit coordinates. It is not only an analysis of consciousness, but also a quiet ethical and ecological hint: the stories we tell about time shape what we think can or should last.

Does it instantiate insight or wisdom?

I assert it does, for several reasons:

  • It compresses a multi-layered understanding of time — physical, psychological, narrative, and ethical — into a single, evocative line, which is characteristic of aphoristic philosophical,

  • It shifts focus away from time as a mere objective container toward time as an active, meaning-laden relationship between beings, their histories, and their hopes of sustaining themselves and their worlds. This reframing can change how someone relates to their own past and future, which is a hallmark of wisdom rather than mere cleverness,

  • It implicitly invites responsibility: if time is something “crafted” to bridge self, story, and sustainability, then we have agency in how we construct and inhabit it, and thus in how gently or destructively we move through our finite biological span.

The statement is an attempt at poetic declaration that can open into reflection on how humans bow to the past, weave stories across their lives, and attempt to carry themselves and their worlds forward under the conditions of mortality. The line offers a lens that can reorient how a reader feels their own time.

References

Augustine. (2004). Confessions (Book XI). New Advent. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110111.htmnewadvent​

Bachelard, G. (2011). The poetics of space (summary and review). Cultural Studies Now. https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2011/06/gaston-bachelard-poetics-of-space.htmlculturalstudiesnow.blogspot​

Heidegger, M. (2025). Being and time (overview). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_timewikipedia​

Krishnamurti, J. (2024). Time according to Krishnamurti. WisdomLib. https://www.wisdomlib.org/history/essay/self-knowledge-in-krishnamurti-philosophy/d/doc1239955.htmlwisdomlib​

Krishnamurti, J. (2022). Psychological time is dangerous. Krishnamurti Portal. https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/psychological-time-is-dangerous/krishnamurti​

Nashotah House. (2020). A time to heal: Time as gift in St. Augustine’s Confessions. Nashotah House Theological Seminary. https://nashotahchapter.com/nashotaharticles/a-time-to-heal-time-as-gift-in-st-augustines-confessionsnbspnashotahchapter​