Tempus fugit, naturam sanat — Time Passes, Nature Heals
Written by: louhi
In June 1905 a young office clerk changed the scientific world’s understanding of something as ordinary as time in a sensational way. His name was Albert Einstein. In a scientific paper, he proposed that time was something quite different from what had been taken for granted: it was not absolute, the same in every corner of the universe, but relative—and far, far more complicated than it first appears.
We humans seem to have a bad habit of taking a mystery, inventing definitions and units for it, slicing it into neat pieces—and forgetting there was ever anything wondrous about it. Time is found in clocks, almanacs, history books, public transport timetables and the infuriatingly short opening hours of the library.
That is more or less what we mean when we speak of time. (Or these days, perhaps more often of not having enough.) With clocks and calendars we have detached time from nature and divided it into precise portions without asking whether we had any right to do so.
Time has been reduced to a system. Once we can read a clock and know the difference between BC and AD, we imagine we know what time is.
We are mistaken.
Einstein’s article was pure physics, a dazzling theory in its own right. But when we approach the question from other directions, what other secrets might time have tucked away?
Before clocks were invented, people lived more strongly according to nature’s rhythm. A day lasted from sunrise to sunset. During the winter darkness, people largely lived on stored provisions and waited for spring and another growing season. The change of seasons was a mythical event and honoured accordingly.
Time was nature. Nature set the pace as it pleased. Work was marked out first by pagan festivals and later by Christianised holidays.
Our modern separation of time from nature has created some curious situations. It is rather upside down that during the season when we are naturally most tired—the dark months of winter—we are expected to work at our most efficient to meet the challenges of the coming year. There are, of course, vitamin supplements, bright-light lamps and all manner of other remedies for this weariness.
That is all well and good, because our globalised world demands a common system of time, particularly to make economic cooperation work. Yet the human body and mind cannot adapt to these historically rapid cultural changes at the same pace. Somewhere inside each of us there is probably still an Iron Age Finn who spent dark winter evenings doing handwork in the cottage. Important work, certainly, but hardly requiring the frantic commotion of our modern world of productivity.
Perhaps here, in the far reaches of the North, a better system would make both the darkest months, roughly November to February, and the hottest, July and August, holiday seasons?
As I see it, time is much more than a straight line proceeding at the pace of definitions imposed by certain people. In the end we know very little about its nature, and we can control it even less. If the bus we take to work is constantly late, we can complain to the transport company. But if spring fails to arrive in April, our grumbling achieves nothing. Time does not even turn an ear.
It flows along paths of its own.
An old person takes their last breath just as a newborn cries indignantly in a midwife’s arms. Kingdoms rise and fall, wars are fought, religions founded—and winter turns into spring, spring into summer, all in their own time. Nature is indifferent to us. On a cosmic scale, even the insignificant thirty thousand years that human beings like ourselves have lived on this fragment of stone mean next to nothing. Let alone a single human life.
We really are a self-important lot when you look at our place in the universe.
Time has other qualities too, ones that matter deeply to human life:
Most of us will probably face hardships at some point that feel utterly impossible to overcome. The feeling is crushing: I cannot go on, I cannot do this. Never, ever will I recover.
And yet, however deep and immense the grief, in some mysterious way it begins to loosen its grip. Quietly, with small, light steps, but surely all the same. Time heals.
One night, not very long ago, I wandered outside trying to calm the feeling eating away at my insides. I looked up at a sky that seemed to flow into infinity. And there I came face to face with Time.
Then I understood. My grief had not disappeared, but I knew that one day it would ease. Certainly.
Just as it always had before.
*Tempus fugit, naturam sanat*—time passes, nature heals. To me these two things belong together; in fact they are almost the same thing. A mystery of life greater than life itself.
“With fragile wings, do I fall among the stars
with fragile wings, do I fall
—
lying on my back on the surface of a sphere
an original inhabitant of space?”
— Seminaarinmäen Mieslaulajat, *Ajassa ja Avaruudessa* —
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