Life can be like that. It may sometimes seem difficult and painful, especially as we get older, but it goes all too quickly. The Eternal Braid Saint Augustine said he knew what time was until someone asked him to describe it. Even when patients are intellectually aware of the accuracy of Newtonian time on their digital watches, they also know that time feels of different duration, depending on their emotions, their sense of well-being or ill health, and their sense of danger or relief. In the preliterate period, time was related to natural events and was more cyclical in form, corresponding to the tides, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the passing and return of seasons.
Patients begin to see time cyclically when the future is seen to be finite.
Time and life is seen in terms of recurring 24-hour days, the rising sun, the changing light in the day, the regular appearance of hospital staff, arrival of meals, the lengthening shadows of the day, lights out, sleep, only to awake to the new light, the arrival of cheerful staff, and the appearance of a tray. These cycles are a series of small recurring events, ignored in earlier, busier, healthier times but now meaningful. When patients become ill, they may begin to see time running backward as well as forward, with life spread out as on a landscape. They may think of where they have been and where they came from, of their families and relationships, and of what came before and what comes after. They think of their grandparents as well as their grandchildren.