I first observed time when I was nine years old. Not to tell it, mind you, but to observe. I had been reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a children’s adventure novel about a girl who attempts to save her lost father. At one point in the book, the girl’s brother teaches her about the dimensions of space using visual models: the first dimension was a line, the second was a square, the third was a cube, and the fourth was time. When I read that passage, I was bewildered at how the brother’s explanation jumped from a cube to time in the third to fourth dimension. I could see a line, a square, and a cube literally drawn in the book, but I could not see a time other than the clock on the wall. Since, however, L’Engle was an adult, she had already convinced me that my intelligence was suboptimal to hers; I accepted the logic of the book and began to think about time as a dimension, even if I failed to understand the concept.
Throughout the years after, I eventually split my understanding of time into two categories. The first, mere scientific knowledge, solved my confusion about L’Engle’s logic concerning how time could be considered a dimension along with physical objects. I had read about Einstein’s “space time” theory and watched follow-up videos on PBS’s NOVA, and thus I began to view time as a location, not a physical line of the past, present, and future. If you’re confused by the logic, just think of this scenario: you text your friend to meetup at some place and some time. Along with the three coordinates of space (x, y, and z) you send your friend, you must always designate a time in which your meeting in that location occurs. Therefore, the time of occurrence is as integral to any event as the location. In fact, time is a location along with the first three dimensions.
However, I concern myself with the second category more often—in fact, every day. It is a developed method of thought that arose from the first category of purely scientific knowledge. Since I have constantly told myself to notice time as a space and not a line over the years, I now think differently about the events that have happened, are happening, or will happen around me. For me, the dimension of time is not the conventional moving path that we view it as, not like the automatic, airport skywalk where we continually move as the present with the past behind us and the future ahead. If the dimension of time is a type of space I walk in, then consider it similar to a room filled with different gases that represent the three tenses, floating around, mingling with each other to form molecules and compounds that join or break at a moment’s notice. I consider how the future and past and present react with each other when I walk in the room, noting what happened and what will happen and thus acting up those thoughts.
Albeit, an abstract description of time might only confuse you, so let us consider the second category in the case of my future affecting my present. My school ends, for example, on  the last day of finals. As a junior, the end of school means the last days of homework, tests, and projects, but I think more about the classmates that I won’t see until next year, specifically the departing Seniors who I have just befriended. I savor the last moments of friendship with them, and then I act upon those thoughts of sentimentality. I think, “this feeling—the Seniors leaving—will happen at this point again next year with my own classmates.” I then imagine my own last day of school, the Baccelearute liturgy, graduation, grad night, the final goodbyes. I am already thinking out the future, exactly what will happen, and return those thoughts to the present. I decide that I need to savor the moments even more with my own junior classmates, I need to befriend those I didn’t know existed in my class, I need to fix bridges between those I have cut off or left behind. The sentimental Seniors example was a grand epiphany for me, a slow formation about the future and the present, but I go through this process of thinking out the future everyday, most in trivial matters like tests and plans with friends.
Now, take it the other way around—my past on my present. I like to call the relationship “lost potential,” a failure to accomplish promises or realize foretold events. My first encounter with it happened in seventh grade. We were reading Romeo and Juliet near the end of the year, and our teacher tells us we would be able to finish. But we didn’t. We moved to eighth grade without finishing the play in class, without our teacher fulfilling the idea that he put in my mind. A hypothetical event like that stays in my head, so every year since, whenever I hear the word Shakespeare or anything related to him, I recall seventh grade. Every time a teacher says we will do something—read a book, watch a film, fly a kite—I become adamant that we need to do it, and, though I can't coerce a teacher into fulfilling their promise, I listen for signs that they will. Lost potential works in this way, taking an event that never happened in the past and ensuring that it happens in the present. It appears with my friends’ plans that never surface, goals that I give up too early on, and, on a more grievous note, loved ones that pass away before I can tell them something endearing.
Of course, I am not unique as a human concerning time. I have not been granted some special ability to observe, not some “gift” like you see in TV shows. My examples of how I notice the future or learn from the past are trained, coming from my education of the space of the fourth dimension, or in other words, the first category. We all consider how the events that have happened or will happen influence what we are doing now, but I did not observe time in the mindset of the second category until I learned from the first. Yes, the first allowed me to notice that time does not flow in your mind when you consider it like a space; it jumbles and tosses itself and warns and surprises you with memories or premonitions.
One day, I will ask a physicist how their own perspective on time alters their mode of thought, if at all, and note how similar it is to my own, with the jumbling, with the reactions, with the constant spatial sight. What will they tell me? I’d be excited to know myself, but their answer is just of general curiosity, not a hopeful awakening. When they will is a far more interesting question to ask, but I know it’ll happen somewhere in the future. I just have to prepare myself now.