I think often of science; of how it can both bind and separate us.

The greatest illusion Mankind ever successfully maneuvered was to measure time. Distance is not a lie: you start walking in one direction, from point A and aim your feet towards point B, and when you arrive you are elsewhere. This is empirical.

When you start walking from point A, with your feet pointed towards point B, you arrive at point B and time has passed. This, too, is empirical. You are elsewhere, and you are older, you are different, and moreover the world is different. But elsewhere is still the same. It is still a different place, but time has travelled with you, and both you and time have arrived in the same elsewhere together; neither of you have been unchanged by the passage of time or the journey. This new place, also, has undergone the same “time”. But again, empirically, you are you and the place is the place; only you’ve both been changed by time. Time, itself, remains unchanged. The only aspect of time that has changed is your perception of it.

Take, for example, the Mayans, and their prediction that the world would end in 2012. Bad/good news, fellas: it didn’t. Or did it? Take a Mayan, from their time, their world, their idea of the heavens and earth, and transport them to our time. Wouldn’t their world, the only world they’ve ever known, have ceased to exist? They would see our world, with no place for them; we would seem as aliens to them. As usurpers of the world they’d believed they’d molded. But they would still be on the same Earth, beneath the same sky; even on the same continent.

Time is real, but Man’s perception of its measurement is an illusion.

Even if I walk a thousand miles, and it takes a great deal of time, it is still I who will arrive a thousand miles later, and it is still my destination that will greet me a thousand miles later. And the same sky that shone above me when I left will shine upon me when I arrive.

With this in mind, need we ever feel lonely? Ever feel the sting of time? Ever feel distant, through space or time, from those we love?

Why, then, do we?