Daniel Palacios

If time does not exist, if we invented it, if we are not even capable of perceiving it in the dimension it belongs in… What do we have left?

We base our understanding of time on movement. I could say I was born 30 years ago but what does that mean? Only that the earth went around the Sun 30 times from then until now.

If we want to measure the passing of time, then we must understand that time is movement, and it has been that way since we were first aware of the changing position of the stars.

A calendar only tells us that, from our perspective, the Earth continues on with its constant and continual movement around the Sun. Just as the clock informs us that, constantly and continually, the Earth still spins around itself. Elements which are familiar and understandable to all of us, they offer us an easy-to-understand simplification on which to organise our life.

But time, which makes us feel secure, simultaneously causes us great anguish because it is unavoidably tied to loss, the inexorable loss which the passage of time causes. We do not have a time sense and in our obsession to understand something it is impossible to see, hear, touch, smell or taste, we discover loss, what was and now will not be.

Time is like the image we cannot see when we look directly for it and only reveals itself when seen out of the corner of our eye, as a collateral event in the study of change.

Nevertheless, the greatest loss is not that we lose our time, that an event turns into another very different one, or that something may disappear and never return again. The worst loss is obscurity, and time as an elusive, evasive image which makes everything look hazy through it.

It is a proven fact that our brain is capable of storing great quantities of information, records each tiny detail of the situations in which we find ourselves, subconsciously analyses our surrounding environment and positions us in it, although our conscious mind is much more limited.

This data is relegated to a lower level, leaving part of them archived as part of our memories, experiences and sensations which will accompany us for our entire life. Others are converted into appendix data, and are subconsciously used for interpreting our first level memories, but we literally lose the physical connection that makes direct access to these information clusters easy for us. However, there are occasions that surprise us when a sensation, generally a smell, can involuntarily create a new bridge and immediately move us to a memory of our early childhood that we were not conscious of for a long time…or even beyond that, make us live ‘implanted memories’, stories of our early childhood we have heard so many times from the mouths of our relatives that in the end we have accepted them as our own memories in spite of the fact they were filtered through a third party.

Clearly our perceptual system is relative, that each person perceives the world through their own filter, that two people don’t see the same tone in a colour and even, depending on what part of the world we have grown up in, whether we are capable of perceiving more or fewer tones of a specific colour.

However, ‘the reality’ of the world becomes even more blurred even when we take into account that what we lived and what we remember having lived are occasionally two very different stories, where a great number of nuances have been eliminated and the rest altered as a result and, like any chain reaction, the effect becomes more and noticeable with the passage of time.

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A changed memory, in spite of being reinterpreted in a different way with the passage of time, is more valuable than the most valuable lost memory for the simple fact of having left a trace of experience. The important thing is not how long it lasts or how many experiences we may have during our life, but what will remain of them in us with the passage of time.

The information is there, but it’s sometimes difficult to access.
Our memory stores everything, but we may not ‘remember’ that those memories are there; it is then that we link our personal experiences to items that we carry around every day in order not to forget… the item is thus not a visualisation, but a link.

A receptive environment is that one we can affect, that one which is listening to us and accepts our presence, it changes, it adapts itself to us. Unknowingly modeled by us.