The Distortion Time Among Colors
So there was this concept called a party. It was simple: gather a bunch of living breathing bodies in the same place at the same time and have fun and see what happens. Some parties are promises, and those are called weddings. Other parties are about the celebration of life, and some are funerals, and they are often meant as goodbyes. There were parties to "Warm" new homes. Time resembles color in other ways. We can only access the smallest silver of both spectrums Non-Linearity and relatively remind us of ultraviolet and red-green- what scientists called impossible measures, colors we can measure but can't see and, like color time, is continuous. We can't locate the seam of an hour, the border of a day- the same way we can declare any precision where yellow becomes orange or orange becomes red. However, throughout human evolution were insatiability sought to structure time. Dividing suns into angles and tidily organizing the story of our lives into years. Humans take the unfathomable expanse of time and refine it into hours. The universe is 13.8 billion years old- who are we to assert the importance of a minute. Time has always been continuous and even counts the days and hours of its work. Then the pandemic happened suddenly. Tuesdays were Thursday, and Sunday was Sunday. Flowers bloomed and wilted, and babies learned to crawl, and grey hairs grew in. However, the larger story of time felt interrupted by bland birthdays and called weddings and solitary holidays. We were doing the same thing in the same place with the same people, day after day after day after day. Previously imperceptible shades of time showed up at the grasps of our doorsteps like special relativity. In the spring, time moved glacially as it does alongside blackholes, then without warning, it accelerated, so when I was what day is it in September, my mom would answer being October 5th or non-linearity. We emerged after months spent holed up in our homes, only to find ourselves reliving the very same moment that had driven us inside the first place. The world joins us into temporal disorientation. Everyone in the world is disoriented in time. Now everyone knows how to arrive five minutes early to repeat the same five minutes 43,854 times. I regretted taking time for granted. Now I would give anything to hear someone say, "Let's go on a hike at 5!" It turns out that our perception of time is incredibly malleable. Even color can distort it. When people are shown blue and red stimuli of the same duration- they consistently overestimate the blue and underestimate the color red. Temperature also wraps time- the hotter we are, the faster we feel it passing and music. Oddly uptempo music decelerates time, and downtempo music hastens it. So if smooth Jazz, Heatwaves, and a bit of blue are enough to mangle time, No wonder a pandemic upended it. In 1983, a paper published in the journal of science described an experiment in which researchers claimed to have overridden the human's eye opponency mechanism- allowing people to see "impossible colors." The participants said the colors were vivid and awe-inducing- a bit entirely indescribable like seeing red for the first time and having no particular name for it. I Imagine them returning into their lives, tucking the impossible colors, into the closets where we store our most inarticulable memories. However, had they not been alone in what they have witnessed, had the whole world woken up one day suddenly able to see new colors. We'd have to create a name in a matter of hours. Because when it comes to color, We innately gravitate towards classifying what we see. Naming the shade between orange and red "Pink," callin the blue of Aegean "royal" and blue of the Caribbean aquamarine. However, when it comes to time, we have such a limited Lexicon, Fast, Slow, Long, short, future, past, and present.
Beyond that, we are pretty much speechless but not hopeless. In 1812, Dietrich Winkel Invented the metronome. Nevertheless, two hundred plus years later, Classical composers still prefer to communicate musical time in sentimental Italian. Maybe we have been too fixated in fixing our metronomes when what we need most is the vocabulary for these new vocabularies of colors of the time. To describe 17-months, millennium-long days, and a year without any parties. Language when time undergoes a phase transitioning right there in your hand- days are melting and months are evaporating and years freezing. Maybe there's a word for that in Italian. Maybe it translates to impossible times.
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