Time travellers

A day trip to London for work starts like any other business trip. What is on the agenda, would I want to spend my time on it? How can I travel there in the shortest time? And what means of transport will I take? What I still do not know is that time will chase me the whole journey.

It starts with the choice for the trip itself. By train then, because flying is too harmful for our planet and the boat takes too long. On the platform I realise that I have to travel to Brussels with the slower Intercity and so I see a colleague at the same time on the other platform boarding the Thalys. He will eventually be in London 2 hours earlier.

Switching trains at Brussels takes longer than I have imagined. A bit bored I am waiting in line for customs and luggage control. Once in the Eurostar I have an undestined feeling as we rush underneath the Channel. A view at the first English hills brings an old memory back to life. I have been here before.

Upon arrival at the Victorian St Pancras station, a word banner high on the wall catches my eyes:

‘I want my time with you’.

That sparks a thought in my mind. It puzzles me what the meaning could be, but then it still doesn’t get to me that I am on a special trip.

The evening slides into the night and at the first rays of sunlight I say to myself a beautiful day has arrived. In the afternoon we have a spare hour and we take a walk over the Millennium bridge across the Thames. It strikes me that the low water indicates the tide. This old Germanic word means ‘time’. The moon does its perpetual work.

Back at the train station I am pulled into the tax free shop like a magnet. Not that I need anything, but then I notice a magazine with a telling cover ‘How our minds create time’.

The fourth dimension appears to have been constructed by mankind. Now I decide to dig deeper into the matter of time and space. On the internet I come across a rather obscure but plausible article. I read further how the Greeks and Romans struggled with the notion of time and space, and called on their gods to create order in the chaos. They invent themselves the sundial, but they turn themselves astray as they let the gods Chronos, Kronos and Saturn define the years, weeks and days and that’s were things get derailed. During the Renaissance it is the Italian scholar and philosopher Galileo that breathes new life into Greek mythology. For the sake of global navigation he turns time into a human invention. Where this wise man has given us the realization of the spherical and spinning Earth in space, he saddles us with a seeming reality of absolute time.

Back in the train we flash through the tunnel and I see the time on my phone jumping one hour ahead when we reach the main land. A lonely cyclist checks his speed while pedalling through the yellow fields. With 300 km per hour I look around me in the silent train wagon and realise that we are in a time machine.

The sun has set. It now becomes pitch dark. The only constant we have in life is the rhythm of day and night. Would the truth come to light at last? The truth does not reveal itself that easily. Upon returning to Rotterdam Central Station, Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus seems to give the answer: ‘Space separates the bodies, not the spirits’. Even space is relative.

The duality of day and night, ebb and high tide, the rhythm of the seasons, nature feels her flawlessly. That we struggle with the teeth of time is our destiny as children of Mother Earth.

Time is an illusion. The wisdom to put the time to our hands rests on an ancient mythology and human invention. By losing ourselves in time, we have made ourselves more important than we are.

Could it be that in reality, we are all children of our sun? We still go to bed when the sun sets and wake up at dawn. Just like the sun we leave traces in space. Her stardust is our unique DNA and life is a space journey. When we go, our children continue our journeys into infinity.

Note: Story written (original in Dutch) as I made my way back from London to Rotterdam on the 12th of July 2019. Pictures were taken as this story unfolded in my mind