What's the Matter With Time?

What’s the matter with time? There’s usually something wrong with it!

And somewhere along the way, free will got mixed up with time. How this happened I can only imagine. Attaching the word free to the word will brings up all kinds of problems

Free will is a kind of jump ball for many philosophers. That free will exists is either a certainty or very doubtful among believers and unbelievers.

I can only imagine that free will is a Christian construct, that free will became systemized at one time into some kind of philosophical movement, the same movement that likes to pull other concepts—freedom, independence, rugged individualism—out of thin air and give them names both the suspecting and the unsuspecting have come to either worship or revile.The word freedom itself is loaded, a kind of loaded gun that is often waved around by people who revere the 2nd Amendment and believe the federal government is coming to take their civil rights away from them.

Perhaps it is time that is the one standing still, and that the concept of free will is the one making mischief, the free will that’s been passed down through the generations of thinkers and philosophers since the 4th century.

There’s lost time and time-after-time, and the tide has turned. There’s in the-nick-of-time, and our time will come. Time usually has the last word.

In the meantime I go swimming at China Beach, admiring how obedient the water and the sun are being, the way they’re working together to keep the advancing fog out of the picture.

At China Beach, San Francisco, the line of fog stiffened and marched from north to south. Photo by author August 26, 2024.