The Fourth Dimension

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
–William Shakespeare

We perceive our world in four dimensions, constituting space and time. The first three dimensions make space, but it’s the fourth that fascinates the most. From ancient philosophies to modern sciences, we’re enchanted by time, -is it cyclical or indefinite? -is it independent or inseparable from the human mind? “What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

Coming from a different language, one realizes that the English language is obsessed with the concept of time. While some languages have no tense at all, there are twelve different tenses within English: the present simple, present continuous, present perfect, and present perfect continuous; the past simple, past continuous, and so on. Viewed in the same sense as space, each preposition gives a unique position in relation to time: on time, in time, over time. Time can even be plural: at times, sometimes, all the times. In describing time, we are really describing the state of being.

As a child, I loved flip-book animation. A line, drawn on each page a different location, suddenly came to life as the pages speedily flipped on. With a pencil and a notebook, I could see how animation was made. The concept lingered with me as I grew old, until one day, I suddenly saw that my world was made the same – each frame a line projected into the 3-dimensional space, and time a set of frames sorted into a specific order. Time arranged every frame into a book of life.

We fear time because we can’t control it. It is the invisible force that carries us to our death. Time ages us; it makes us old and wears us out. Yet it also cultivates characters, wits, and resilience. Time is an unbending arrow, but also a sequence of events to realize the act of living. Without it, we’d be stuck on one frame, never growing or learning.

Modern life is lived in a hurry. Every problem brings a sense of urgency and the anxiety that there’s not enough time. Yet, most can be solved simply by passing time. We cannot do everything at once, but we could do everything if we would give them time.