Greenwich is in England. It’s a part of London. That’s where I am these days and where I am planning to stay for a little while longer- near London. Exploring interesting places and cities. And this one is undoubtedly one of those, worth of mentioning.
When I was a child, I was afraid of time. Yes I am aware of how weird it can sound. Usually it’s spiders, snakes or ghost under the bed that scared us the most. I was definitely not a regular kid. And believe me or not, it was not the freakiest phobia I had.
I remember little me, sitting in a kitchen, watching the magnets on a fridge doors. I remember how hard I was trying to keep that moment from passing. I wanted to stop the time by staring at the same point. Then I heard something that stole my attention and the ‘me and the magnets‘ moment was over. You cannot imagine that fear and hopelessness that went through my childish brain. I couldn’t just look back. No! It was not the same time anymore. It was not the same moment! I started to cry.
I have really no clue how a 7-year old could come up with such an idea. Fortunately, my mum had always understanding for strangeness of her little daughter (and she has it until today) and didn’t seem too worried when she found me there crying, not willing to accept unstoppability of time. It happened a few more times after that, mostly when I was counting days remaining until the end of summer holidays.
Greenwich is a place lying on a meridian line. This place is a boundary between two time zones, place where your watches show the most accurate time and where all the tourists wait in a long queue to take a legendary picture of them standing with each foot on a different side of the time border.
I am not an exception.
However, there is something better than that line. The museum of time. You wouldn’t find there a time itself, of course, how could you. The human attempts to define it are there to see. All the experiments and methods that were used to capture, name and understand time. Well the humans are quite smart creatures.
Time is more a measuring instrument than a dimension. A man created tool to measure distances, longitude and nature cycle. We have defined the time because of the need to mark the movement of the stars in schedule or chart or to find an exact position on an open ocean. As I have learned, most important thing while lost in a sea is to know an exact time. You can read it from position of the sun somehow (to be honest I have to practice that one). Then, comparing it to the international time, you would get your geographic position. Useful. Especially when you break your smartphone somewhere in the middle of the ocean or so.
I am not afraid of time anymore. However, I never stopped to be fascinated by it.
Time is a matter of movement. It’s the number of change in respect of before and after. It’s where past and future exist. It’s governed by movements of the stars and Space itself. Like a space refers to existence of things, the time refers to its movement.
I am not an author of this theory. Aristotle is. Don’t you get it?
It’s simple. The Space moves. All the planets move. In accordance to that, there are things like sunset. We have a nights and days, future and past. We found a way to measure it and that unit we’re using, is time. We gave a name to that moment in which sun disappear behind the horizon and we gave it a number in “hours”. That means the thing, which scared me when I was a child wasn’t time. It was movement. Because unstoppability of time is caused by immutable direction of movement. Easily said, the space cannot flow backwards.
There are places that make you think. Greenwich is one of them. I highly recommend you to visit it once. Galleries and museums are sometimes boring but believe me, this one is not. It is that kind of a place where you will forgot the time while learning about it. And then, all of a sudden, some guy comes to tell you that they’re closing.
OK, so one last curiosity. Did you know, why is the meridian line in Greenwich? Because Sir George Airy decided it to be, when he built the observatory there in 1851. It could have been anywhere!
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