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For anyone caught up in a war, perception of time is one of the most significant changes that accompanies the dangers.
It is not as if we do not experience time shifts and changing yardsticks on a regular basis in any event, but conflict is all-engrossing, pitching us into unfamiliar routines.
Quirks of time range from the trivial to the profound. Throughout our lives the Doomsday Clock has been something in the background. It moved earlier this year to 85 seconds from midnight and feels that bit closer than it has at any time in my adulthood.
Every year the newspapers fill with news of Punxsutawney Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog that supposedly heralds six more weeks of winter – or not. If you are in North America that perhaps means something but not much elsewhere, yet the headlines still convey news on the upcoming weather corridor. Somehow, I find that it sets a framework of expectations as winter peters out.
Europeans experienced over the weekend the shift in the clocks to summertime. The biannual ritual is largely loathed by discombobulated people and seems out of kilter with digital timekeeping. Somehow there is never enough legislative headroom to get rid of it. North America went through the same shift three weeks earlier, which creates another kink in the earth’s timeframe.
Time is a universal reality, but it is also applied through the human brain both individually and collectively. If it were to be weighted in a personal mathematic formula, the heaviest portion would be now.
Time gives us perspective. It governs how we measure. Emotions are calibrated through our time calculus. Time flows. We say that emotions build. How we view things shifts. All through the prism of time.
It also helps define history. Journalism of the next day variety is defined by this.
In England there is the saying that the news that appears so gripping and vital when fresh has an expiry date. The newspaper is tomorrow’s chip wrapper (fish and chips were once batched in copies of the morning news or indeed evening variety). To more reflective observers, the news is the first rough draft of history. Yet when you are caught in an incident, the vital truth is that there is not space to think of the second or third rough drafts.
A few days after the Iran war was launched on February 28, I found myself winding an old-fashioned watch. To get to my date in March I had to go past the 29th, 30th and 31st. Now February, barring its four-year leap to the 29th, does not have these dates but for a moment I considered an alternative reality that played out across those ‘missing’ days.
What if the war had been contained within that non-existent time frame? In fact, going into the war there was every expectation that US President Donald Trump would do that very thing. After all, Mr Trump constantly talks about how he resolved the 12-day war last June, when the US participation was barely more than a single day.
One truism in the commentary on this war is that last June’s action – with bombers that took 17 hours to reach Iran – already put the country’s nuclear material beyond use. US and foreign government officials say fissile material has not been a target in the current conflict, underlining the point.
How often over the last month and few days has Mr Trump indicated he was about to declare victory and wind it up? Certainly, the markets have believed this shifting narrative. Hence the failure to trigger a sell-off that is justifiable now but also could have taken place in early March from the same perspective.
Mental models take all this information and patch it across time in individual ways. It is important to be aware of how this dynamic is personal and ever-changing at the same time. Add the unfamiliarity of conflict and the lack of respect for time-bound rituals like bedtime and even prayer.
Jo Marchant, the science writer, explores this in her new book In Search of Now, using words like tapestry and stream to describe how time envelops humans. She writes that sifting moments, seconds, minutes and years is a process of blending by the brain.
To extend the tapestry metaphor: when these threads fall apart, so too does a large part of our identity. Things can exist and not exist in a crisis. In quantum physics, as Marchant puts it, “what experimenters find depends on how they decide to look”.
Balanced against all of this, for many in the Middle East, has been the brute reality of warfare: the missile launches, the sirens, the prospect of more and the cumulative uncertainties.
Behind it all lies our relationship with time – and the unsettling truth that in war, the clock does not just measure events but shapes how we endure them.
