Saturday Writing Prompt: What Can Happen In A Second

“What can happen in a second?”

Although this might appear, on the face of it, to be a ridiculous question, the truth of the matter is that it is not.  “What can happen in a third,” now that is a ridiculous question.  We all know what should have happened in the fourth, namely that Pete Carroll should have given the ball to Marshawn Lynch, and everyone who has ever truly experienced The Blues can tell you that nothing good comes out of a fifth, especially if it’s Four Roses Bourbon.

Of course, the question doesn’t refer to ordinal numbers, but to the unit of time, commonly held by humans as the shortest basic division of this shared illusion, this scaffolding within which we construct our lives.  Sure, there are shorter measurements of time, such as the Fleeting Moment or the One Damn Minute, but these are not calculated against any sort of universal or natural constant, for example, the decay of a carbon atom, or the numerical relationship between an NBA player’s salary and the distance they must move while carrying the ball before being called for traveling.  (LeBron James: 4.8 kilometers.)

So, this second, this one-Mississippi that is the basic building block of our entire concept of the space-time continuum.  What can happen in it?  What tasks can one fit in between two ticks of the clock?  What events can occur in 1/3600th of an hour?  

Well for starters, a photon can cover 299,792,458 meters in a second.  That’s pretty darn fast, and kind of impressive, until you consider that photons get slowed right down to around thirty miles per hour or so when passing though a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is basically supercooled helium.  Which tells you right there that that whole business about the speed of light being a universal constant is pure bollocks.  I can travel faster than the speed of some light; all I need is a Honda Cub.  Those’ll do forty easy if you’re light and on a downhill grade.

Some people will also try to tell you that it only takes a second to fall in love.  Usually, these people are writers of pop songs, who deal in these sorts of platitudes on a daily basis and purchase them wholesale.  These sayings used to be handcrafted by men named Jerome and Herman, solid American craftsmen who worked in the Brill Building; nowadays they are churned out at a tenth of the cost by factories in Shenzhou.  This is why we no longer have songs like “Just One Look (That’s All It Took),” and instead have, “Mightily Forward The Day!  Profoundness!”  This would be a powerful statement on the sad decline of pop music as an art form, except that it never was one.

Having said all that, is it possible to fall in love in one second?  Probably not.  I live in Tokyo, Japan, which has one of the largest populations of any city in the world, and a large percentage of that population consists of attractive females.  I used to think that I was falling in love quite frequently and rapidly, as often as twenty or thirty times per day, possibly more if I was in Shibuya and it was summertime.  With age and wisdom, however, I now realize that I was, in fact, falling in lust, not love.  Love takes a long time to develop and cultivate, and requires that the two parties really get to know one another and establish a real commitment.  Feh.  Who has time for that these days?  I’m more concerned about getting good WiFi than falling in love.

I think the best thing we can do with this sample second, therefore, is grab it, hold it tightly, and do something useful with it.  For example, let’s try attaching it to the one that comes directly after that.  Then, let’s do that again.  And again, and again, sixty times.  

This reveals the truth that has been concealed from us up until now.

What can happen in a second?

We can begin to build a minute.

From a minute, we can build a hour.

From hours, we can build days, months, years, a lifetime.

If that second, that first second, has a seed planted in it, the other seconds will, too.  We can change, create, destroy, or rebuild.  We can move, or stop.  We can become what we most desire, or embrace stasis and eventual entropy.

We only ever have one second.  The ones behind us are gone, the ones ahead are as yet undelivered and exist only in potentia. 

What can happen in a second?

Choice.