Matter of time

If every single movement in and around us comes to a standstill, we will lose all perception of time. The only reason we felt the old year pass and the new year dawn is because we saw a lot of events around us in a process of continuous change and motion. The concept of time is man-made. It's only a measurement of change occurring all around us. It's almost as if there's nothing called time; there's only a process of change, and we have some instruments that measure change at equal intervals.

If you leave a piece of iron unattended, it will rust. If a garden is not tended to, it will become a wild forest. Your inaction doesn't freeze your circumstances because infinite changes around you don't stop. Your action is at best a small, perhaps irrelevant, contributor towards creating your future.

Kaal is described in Jainism as a heap of jewels whose one undivisible unit cannot occupy more than one undivisible unit of akasa, space. So, a shift in the composition of kaal creates a change in the composition of space and everything else that occupies it, similar to the changing designs in a kaleidoscope.


Whether understood through metaphysics or experience, time is nothing but change; only change is permanent. What existed in the past is irrelevant and gone, and what will happen in the future is hardly controllable. It is always today and now that matters.