Imagine your world without time. No clocks to check. No appointments scheduled by the hours and minutes. You have nothing to measure time, not even by the movement of the sun as the Egyptians did when they created a shadow clock in 1500. You have no device that measures time by numbers, which was first introduced in the United States by Benjamin Banneker in the mid-18th century.

You have no concept of measured time just like your dog has none. His body clock reminds him when he should eat or when you should take him for a walk if you are so inclined to do so every day. Your dog sleeps as much as 16 hours a day, but he can’t know that. You leave him alone in the house for seven hours and when you return, he never asks, “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting all day for to come home.” Instead, he wags his tail as if you had just disappeared from his sight and then he sees you again as if you had just returned from another room.

They say that we have free will to do whatever we want to do and whenever we want to do it. Life begins at infancy for us with no concept of hours or minutes and like our dogs, we have only our body clocks to tell us when we’re hungry and it’s time we should eat. Before we were of age to go to school, time was of no essence. We watched TV cartoons without knowing that Bugs Bunny came on at 9:30. We slept when we got tired and awakened not by an alarm clock, but whenever our eyes opened.

When we started school, we were taught to tell time and everything we did for the rest of our lives was determined by numbers pointing to the big hand and the little hand. Throughout our education, we attained our knowledge by the clock. In high school, we read Romeo and Juliet for 40 minutes each day. Too bad if you were at the critical part of their love story when the bell rang. Time to get to the next class and while your mind is still wondering if Romeo will die just to be with Juliet, you hear a voice say, ”Let’s review what we learned yesterday about parallelograms.”

Once we finish school, we go to work and our brains are forced to operate at their maximum levels within slots of time. We have an hour to finish this project, 20 minutes to get that task done and have it on the boss’s desk not past his deadline. On the job, we punch time clocks, we eat lunches within the same block of time every day. Try to imagine not having no limits of minutes. Take as much time you need to finish the work. Eat lunch when you want and take as long as you want. You will work better and do better without the stress of the next tick of the minute hand or the flash of the digital number. But no, that’s not how we must live. We are held prisoners by time.

You work 30 years or more and then comes retirement and you quickly learn that the clock no longer controls your lifestyle. Everything turns into temporary chaos. Your body and mind know not what to do without the regulation of time. You don’t know if it’s 2 or 3 p.m. You have to ask somebody what day of the week it is. You need to look at a calendar to tell yourself what date it is and check when you have an upcoming doctor’s appointment.

We are born into a timeless world and then we are thrust into life management not by our fee will, but by the tick tock of the clock until our twilight years when we return to the freedoms of that timeless world that we had at early childhood.

If I get another chance at life after this one, I’d like to be a dog in a good family. If I could talk to another dog, say a beagle one day while we sit at the park, here’s what our conversation might be.

Me: What time is it?

Be: What’s that?

Me: I don’t know. I just heard my owner ask your owner.

Be: Don’t know. Don’t care.

Me: You hungry? My owner said it will be time to eat soon.

Be: My owner knows when I’m hungry.

Me: My owner said it’s time to go home now.

Be: Don’t know nothing about this thing you call time. I’ll move along when she pulls my leash.

Regardless of one’s belief in heaven or hell, pre-birth and post-life have one significant thing in common, a state of unconsciousness without time. When we are asleep, we exist in that same unconsciousness, a world absent of passing hours and minutes. Sleeping is a return to a state of pre-birth and is also a preparation for a timeless and peaceful death.

So, can we imagine our world without time? When I look down at Sophie my lady friend’s schnauzer, I see she’s asleep again, that comes after last night’s sleep that was after yesterday’s afternoon’s snooze. It’s 10 in the morning, but she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

I feel strangely wise now. I really can imagine a world without time. I just have to observe this little dog do what she does all day long.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com