In the episode Shallow Seas of BBC's Planet Earth series there is footage of a great white shark attack. The footage is slowed down to so many degrees that the entire attack of the shark jumping out of the water in picture-perfect precision and grabbing a seal midair takes place on the television screen for at least 30 seconds if not closer to a minute. After the episode there was a segment about the filming of the attack. A special camera was used and the crew patrolled the shark infested waters for weeks before getting the right one. In this footage we see the cameraman shoot the shark attack segment we see in the show. In this instance the attack we see is over before we can even tell what it was. Half a second tops, there is only time to see a splash in the distance before it disappears. But the footage we see on the show was taken from that half a second.

Time is just playdough. The speed at which we live our life is not how time progresses. It is only the way we as humans perceive it. It's easy to forget that Einstein taught us time and space are relative to one another, and it is impossible to separate one from the other, both work together to create the fabric of our universe. "Time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space, because the rate at which time passes depends on an object's  velocity relative to the speed of light and also on the strength of intense gravitational fields, which can slow the passage of time."

Blah and blah because why does it really matter? We only go through time at the pace we know it so no use thinking about how it might actually be progressing. Yes, that is true. But perhaps time is worth some thought because it is an omnipresent agent in all of our lives. We are defined in our lives only by what we do with the time we have. We write calendars and create schedules to make available as much time as possible. We invent machines to do old tasks quicker leaving us to do more with our time. Efficiency marks our days and our nights.

I guess it is a futile undertaking to dissect time, but still, with the right amount of focus on the present we as humans can exert a degree of control over it. Think about filming your own life with the high-tech cameras from planet earth. Think of doing every mundane task 100 times slower. Seeing a slower world means you can focus on what needs to be changed. And that slow speed is what has propelled society forward for generations. Training your brain to a new task is as simple as slowing everything down. Learning something new means start slow. Start with the basics, the fragments, the individual frames of the footage. Slowing everything down paradoxically means we'll be able to go a whole lot faster later on.