Quartz Day, 10th of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The faster we go, the slower time passes. Einstein proved this with mathematics I don't pretend to understand, but imagine this: you're on a spaceship traveling at near-light speed, say 99% the speed of light. You turn on your "headlights." What happens? Does light move ahead of your spaceship at 186,282 miles per second, the speed of light? Or since you're already moving at 184,419 mi/sec, 99% of the speed of light, does it move ahead at "only" (186,282 - 184,410 =) 1,863 mi/sec? 

Here's the head-scratcher: relativity, as I understand it, says "no," you will perceive the light moving ahead at the full 186k mi/sec, but if a stationary observer were somehow watching all this, they would see the light "slowly" moving forward from your ship at 1.86k mi/sec.

Einstein surmised that the reason this can happen, that light can be moving forward at both 186k and 1.86k, is that time is passing more slowly to the people on the spaceship relative to the stationary observer. The speed of light is constant but time is not. 

To that photon emitted by the spaceship's headlights, traveling at the full speed of light, time is so slow that it actually stops and time doesn't exist at all. To the photon, no time passes between being emitted from the headlamp and arriving at whatever planet or other body with which it eventually collides. 

The star Deneb, a supergiant in the Cygnus constellation 200,000 times brighter than Helios, our Sun, is 2,600 light-years from Earth. When we observe Deneb, we're seeing light emitted 2,600 years ago, around the time of the Buddha. We're seeing Deneb as it existed in 574 B.C., but to a photon emitted from Deneb back then, no time has passed during its long trip to Earth. To the photon, it was emitted and instantaneously arrived here. The passage of time does not exist to something traveling at the speed of light.

Of course, all this is further complicated by the fact that we're not really stationary. We're on a spinning planet traveling around Helios at 67,000 mph, which itself is moving through the Milky Way galaxy at 447,000 mph. You'd have to be some sort of Einstein to take all that into consideration. 

So, what is time, if it can speed up and slow down, or simultaneously exist and not exist? 

The Chinese Zen Master Yaoshan Weiyan was born in 745 A.D., or when the light we now see from Deneb was halfway between the distant star and us, and wrote a poem about time:  

Time is standing atop a soaring mountain peak

Time is plunging to the bottom of the Ocean

Time is a three-headed, eight-armed deity

Time is a golden sixteen-foot statue of Buddha 

Time is a monk’s staff or his ceremonial whisk

Time is an outdoor pillar or a stone lantern

Time is your next-door neighbor or a man on the street

Time is the whole of the earth and of boundless space

The stanzas of Yaoshan's poem compares time to the highest of highs and the deepest of deeps, to demons and saints, to the sacred and the commonplace. I think the point of the poem comes in the last line - time is not a "thing" but is in fact everything. Time is space and space is time. Yaoshan  (745-834) and Einstein (1879-1955) got there by very different means, but I don't think their understandings were far apart. 

To take this one step further, time is space and space is time, and all things exist in space-time and cannot exist outside of space-time, so all things, in effect, are manifestations of time. The present moment is the only point in which our existence comes together with time and all things exist only in this present moment. On the other hand, time is required for all actions and time can only be realized through action. 

Today, this present moment, is a walking day but the forecast is a 100% chance of rain, so I'm staying inside instead, and see what happens in my mind when it doesn't have a long walk or 90 minutes of sitting mediation to occupy it?