If we want to know the time, we look at our watch, phone, or computer. What we see is not actually time, but numbers.

Modern people are very sensitive to time because we can easily know the exact hour, minute, and second. But if we go back a few hundred years, or even one or two thousand years, how did people know the time? What did time mean to them?

Two thousand years ago, the capital of the Tang Empire in China was Chang’an City. People in Chang’an knew the time by listening to drumbeats. Every morning at five o’clock, a series of drumbeats would sound from the palace city, spreading like the fire on a beacon tower across all 108 wards in the city. Each ward would respond with its own drumbeats. A ward was essentially a walled, enclosed neighborhood in Chang’an, with its own walls and ward gates.

At five in the afternoon, another series of drumbeats would ripple through the city, and the ward gates would gradually close.

Thus, people living in Chang’an at that time could only judge the time by these two sets of drumbeats.

With the development of science, people’s grasp of time has certainly become more and more precise. But can we really say that we have mastered time?

Can we mold time into something like a ball and hold it in our hands? Can we see what color time is? Can we describe the specific shape of time?

Perhaps we can’t. It’s like the wind. Who can truly describe what the wind looks like? We can only know the wind exists through the branches it sways, the hair it tousles, or the plastic bags it sends dancing in the air.

But from beginning to end, we have never seen the true face of the wind.

Likewise, we have never seen the true face of time.

The Chinese say that time is like flowing water. Indeed, we can imagine time as a river that never stops. Where does it come from, and where does it go? We don’t know. But it seems we have all jumped into this river of time, going with the flow, until one day, we are suddenly washed ashore, arriving at a place from which there is no return.

Of course, time may not be as elusive as we imagine. Perhaps, as in the movie Interstellar, different moments in time can be like a series of similar yet distinct rooms. As long as we find the entrance, we can step into different times. We can go back to the past or travel to the future, just as we can leap into the upstream or downstream of the river of time.

Einstein even told us that time does not have a uniform flow rate. The flow of time varies in different places. When you enter a planet near a black hole, you might experience “one day in the heavens, one year on Earth.” So, an astronaut who travels in space for a while might return to Earth to find that their children are older than they are.

But we must tell you that perhaps time doesn’t exist at all. Everything is just our own imagination. There is no past, no future, only the present. Everything is just a series of moments. Our entire life seems continuous, but it is actually just a collection of individual “moments.” Just like when we shoot a video, we’re not capturing something continuous; it’s just a series of still images combined to make us think we’re seeing a continuous process.

Perhaps everything is an illusion, a product of our mind’s imagination. The entire world is a product of our mind’s imagination. What we see and hear is all processed by our imagination. After all, the world only exists as something centered around “me” as a pivot. So, time might just be the ropes that connect the things extending from this pivot.