Time wont tell, time tells nothing, it locks its knowledge away in meticulously maintained, bar-coded and sequentially numbered  zip lock bags, silently awaiting the next decisive moment to materialise at which point it stretches out its hand plucks the moment from space and tosses it into its coffers with all the others. That moment you refer to as time standing still is just time itself pausing your existence briefly to replace your reality with the backup copy that was running on a six second delay loop.

Time has no reason to offer us anything, time is a depository not a library, a drumbeat not a melody, an indexless flat file vault not a relational SQL queryable treasure trove of memories, it is time that is the true omnipotent being, not some needs-no-introduction, preceded by legend airborne dude with a beard and no second name.Time is now, it is so now that it is over by the time you start saying “now”. Time transcends the contemporary, it’s the heartbeat’s heartbeat. We can remember a time, long for a next time, live in a time, be about time, on time, overtime, double overtime, golden goal extra time, out of time. We can waste, kill, buy, count, tell, do or borrow time we can even make time. We can do all that whilst simultaneously maintaining absolutely no control over its passage.

Historians look back trying to learn time’s lessons and develop some logical order to use in predicting the future. Philosophers remain focused on the here and now documenting the bits that time doesn’t really care about but we feel are necessary to justify our status as thinking beasts. Mathematicians try to break time, or the rules it imposes on us in an effort to prove that at any point in time, time is the most important force in the universe that has been created by man and therefore doesn’t actually exist.

An atomic clock loses a second every few thousand years, If you had one on your kitchen wall it would take two hundred thousand years before you started missing the bus and thinking, best get the ladder out and set the time on that clock. If your kitchen wall had a clock that wasn’t working, it would be completely accurate twice a day, set it to 10 minutes before your bus is due and timetable variations aside you should never miss it.

Time doesn’t listen, it has already heard what you are about to say.