TICK-TOCK NEVER HAPPENED
One Man and One Arrow
Long ago — before empires, before calendars, before mechanical hearts with gears — lived a man.
History didn’t preserve his name, only a nickname: The One Who Started the Count.
He sat by the fire and watched the shadow of a tree glide across a stone. He noticed the sun returned. Water dripped in rhythm. A flower bloomed not all at once, but according to a hidden plan.
He took a rope and two stones — and began to divide the World.
First into "before" and "after." Then into morning and evening. Then into hours, minutes, seconds.
He invented Time. Not as a feeling — but as a device.
At first, it was a calendar of rituals. Then hourglasses, star charts, church bells.
And then… began the slavery of time.
In 1656, a clever Dutchman named Christiaan Huygens, tired of all the "around noon" and "after lunch," looked at a pendulum and realized:
"Wait. We can measure this!"
He combined pendulums, mechanisms, and science — and invented precise time.
Thus, humanity first heard:
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
And was never able to unhear it again.
...But imagine if he hadn’t.
He just looked, shrugged, and walked away.
He could have become the god of time…
…but chose a strong Arab brew in a café by the canal.
II. A WORLD WHERE NOBODY KNOWS WHEN TO WAKE UP
What if Time never existed?
Let’s peek into an Impossible World, where this invention never occurred.
Where clocks are myths, and the word "yesterday" sounds as absurd as "upward" underwater.
This is a world without numeric coordinates.
Where no one says, "three minutes left."
Because nothing is left. Everything just is.
Welcome to the World Without Time.
Nobody hurries, but no one waits.
The sun rises — and that’s all anyone needs to know.
Not abstract — this is daily life:
- No clocks. Wristwatches, towers — gone.
- No timers. No egg boiling countdowns.
- No schedules. And no being late.
- Time is not linear. It does not exist.
III. HOW THEY LIVE
People - Wake when rested, not by a cruel beep-beep.
- Show up when "the moment arrives" — not early, not late, but... naturally.
- No one yells, "You're late!" — because you can’t be late where no time was agreed upon.
Medicine
- No appointments at 2:45 PM. Patients come when the body signals.
- Surgeries aren’t scheduled. They happen when the patient breathes calmly, the surgeon is focused, and tools are warm.
- Anesthesia is dosed by pupils, by pulse, by presence.
- Terrifying? Yes.
- But somehow more alive than by stopwatch.
Transportation
- Trains don’t follow timetables. They appear when people gather.
- No rush hour traffic. Rush hours don’t exist.
- Navigation is done by light paths and the flight of birds.
Education
- No school bells. Students come when "ready to learn."
- Lessons last as long as they're engaging — not 45 minutes.
- No exams "in a week" — just the moment of knowing.
- Scientists don’t publish to meet deadlines. They write while the thoughts flow.
- Publishing? Maybe someday. Or maybe not.
Work
- No "workdays." People labor when they feel it matters.
- Projects finish not by deadline — but by inner completion.
- Wages aren't by hours, but by contribution.
IV. WHAT ABOUT ART?
The artist begins a painting...
And finishes it when the painting itself stops changing.
No one demands: "When's the premiere?"
Because no one here sells tickets for 8:00 PM.
They come when the music is already playing,
and stay while it plays.
A concert might begin with the singing of wind in the pines,
and end when the campfire fades out.
Such a world may never build skyscrapers.
But it creates music that never ends.
Architecture no one "completes" — because there’s no rush.
Here, no one sells time. No one loses it.
Because no one knows it exists.
V. AGELESS, TIMELESS
Nobody knows how old you are.
You’re either wise, in love, or both.
No "youth" or "old age" — just maturity of body, experience of spirit.
Nobody says: "I’m thirty-four and three months."
Nobody says:
"Wow, you’ve been together 7 years!"
Instead, they say:
"You still look at each other like the first time."
Here, love isn’t measured in timelines.
It either is, or it isn’t.
Everything else is excess.
Some call it chaos.
Locals call it synchronicity.
VI. AND IF WE ARRIVED THERE?
We live by stress. They live by flow.
We measure. They experience.
We ask: "When does it begin?"
They reply: "When you’re ready."
But what if we ended up there?
We, from the world of timers, deadlines, and tickers — would lose our minds.
It would be unbearable:
- How do you orient?
- How do you plan?
- How do you keep up?
Yet maybe, after thousands of breaths, we would begin to see, not measure.
To listen, not log.
To feel, not monitor.
VII. NEURONAVIGATION
To live like this, you need a different brain.
- No calendars.
- No five-year plans.
- No morning panic from the alarm.
Here, instead of the temporal cortex, humans evolve a new region: the coriolis of intuition (yes, local neuroscientists call it that).
You don’t know it’s time to go — you feel it.
You sense when a meeting will happen. When night will end.
And it works. Almost always.
And unlike vision or hearing, humans don’t have a sensory organ for time.
There is no "clock" in the brain.
Instead, our sense of time is distributed, flexible, and deeply contextual.
It emerges from an intricate dance of motion-tracking neurons, attention, memory, and internal rhythms.
Neuroscience tells us the brain tracks time on three distinct scales, each governed by different regions:
- Milliseconds to seconds — handled by the cerebellum and basal ganglia, enabling speech, rhythm, and quick reflexes.
- Minutes to hours — managed by the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, allowing planning and short-term memory.
- Days to years — mapped by the default mode network, shaping narrative identity and reflection.
Now imagine: if seconds and minutes had never been invented, this inner architecture would evolve differently.
Our cerebellum might lose its sharp rhythm.
Our memories might store feelings instead of timestamps.
We might sync through shared presence instead of synchronized clocks.
We'd be beings of flow, not of schedule.
VIII. STILL… WHERE DID TIME COME FROM?
Maybe time doesn't objectively exist — only as an illusion to manage chaos.
To stack the infinite on tidy shelves.
To not go mad in the face of eternal now.
IX. AT THE EDGE OF WORLDS
At the border of the worlds, a man sits by the fire.
He finds a pendulum.
He senses it will swing.
And in that moment, he may:
- Start the count.
- Or let the silence continue.
What would you do?
X. WE ARE THE DESCENDANTS OF MEASUREMENT
Christiaan Huygens may not have realized he would forever change history by creating a device to measure what isn’t real.
He gave us flight, lateness, deadlines, aging, waiting, regretting, and running.
But maybe, in some impossible world,
he just stared at the pendulum…
…and let the silence continue.
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