Jim Estill's 8 Rules Of Time
"Time is from the Latin word 'tempus', which means both 'time' and, according to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 'season'. But when did humans first start to think about time? It's unknown."
Jim Estill has a theory on this - he says that time was first thought of by ancient people as the amount of work it took for a farmer to grow their crops. "Beginnings" was originally meant for plants and animals, not humans. We started calculating time as our own after we decided that human life should have meaning. That is why Jim believes calendar dates are so significant - they mark off days with significance in our lives.
"Time was a concept that became attached to humanity really because we started taking notice of ourselves. We weren't just the animals with the basic needs. We started to see that there was such a thing as 'me' - an individual who might have got things done, but would it have been different if I hadn't done it? No, of course not."
In other words, in terms of time, we are all blank slates - each one of us came into this world exactly how our parents wanted us to be. But over time we developed and they shaped us. We developed in our own ways - some good, some bad.
"We can look at ourselves and say 'it wasn't perfect, but what happened in the past has happened, and it can't be changed'. That's a philosophy of time. I've always thought that was really interesting."
This is why Jim was always interested in history and because of games like "Civilization" - strategy games that have players build empires throughout time - he was also interested in the study of time. His job as a musician focused too much on the present, so he wanted to get into something that would give him a deeper insight into this. The first book Jim read on the topic was "Time: A Philosophical Introduction" by Richard M. Gale and Alan G. Padgett. He says it was interesting, but more like a textbook.
"He was talking about a whole bunch of deep stuff, but I didn't really understand it. I got bored of that because there wasn't much practical information in the book that could help me in my own personal life."
After reading that book, he found another: "Time" by Berhard Jurgensen. In this book, Jim learned that time has always been a concept used to explain things and events (such as seasons), but in the western world it had an extra dimension of "progress". It could explain how we were progressing through history and where we were at the time.
"Time is something that is always abstractly there and it's definitely not a physical thing, but it's so much a part of our lives that we can't get away from it. That's why I found that really interesting too."
Jim went on to attend the University Of Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK where he studied philosophy. He began writing a dissertation about time and had to choose one question to answer from the many he had: "How do we tell time?" was one of them. He was studying how different people told time - how clocks were invented, when people began wearing watches and so on.
He did his dissertation on watches - how they were invented, why people wear them and so on. But some professors told him to do a different topic, so he chose the question: "Why do we need to know what time it is?"
The first time he learned about the concept of "free will", Jim says, was when he was talking about this question.
"I had this idea that free will could be thought of as being decided in advance that you would have a choice between two things, but something that you couldn't see in advance what would happen because your choices weren't always the same."
So Jim had now discovered how telling time to people was linked to the idea of free will.
"I became interested in that and I came back to philosophy and started writing about time. I'd been wondering 'why do we need to know what time it is?'. I wanted more of something approaching a theory on how we tell time. I wanted something that was tied into free will, and if you look at the history of clocks, they were one of the first devices that people used as an example of technology as being able to help them make decisions."
"That's because they are fairly simple mechanical things that people can understand - they have gears and turning mechanisms. Things like clocks are an example of science helping us make better decisions. And then history was important because it showed that people have always been making better decisions based on technology as well as philosophy."
"I got interested in philosophy because I thought it would be interesting to start looking at what ideas really meant and thinking about things in a way that's not too much like reading a textbook. Philosophy can be interesting if you're willing to go on and look at all the different views and try to find out how each of them is right or wrong."
Jim notes that he can get carried away when he's researching topics, but then he'll read, research and think about it over the course of weeks - sometimes even months - before he comes back with an idea. At first he didn't think publishers would agree that he could write a book on such a complicated topic, but they eventually said they'd published all the books he wanted to.
"That's because I read so many different articles, and was talking to a lot of people who knew more about the history of time than I did, that by the time I got everything together, everyone else had moved onto something else. So no one had any reason to say 'No!'. "
He thought it would be a good idea to write the book in such a way that people could get an idea of the history of time, but also read about what he thought about it. It would help them understand why he had come to this conclusion and how.
"I decided I wanted to really explain my own ideas, not just give them - because at first when I was writing the topics were different from mine, but by the time I got it finished up, my views were quite different from what other people said. There wasn't anyone who agreed with me 100%. So I thought it would be good that people could read my own ideas and take them or leave them."
Jim knows there are a lot of books written on the history of time and he's "a bit intimidated" by them, because of how detailed they are. He believed he wanted to be in the loop at the beginning, but then realized that he "didn't have to get it absolutely right" first.
He's also aware that some people have given up on history because they say that it's boring and not engaging enough, so he wants to make sure people understand why they shouldn't feel like that.
Conclusion
Many people will be able to relate to Jim's story. They might have done exactly what he did and, at first, thought it was a "waste of time".
It's going to be interesting for you to read this book, especially if you're a history buff who has never really wanted to get involved in the subject before.
Time is something we don't have too much experience with, because most of us only live in the present moment.