What is time...to you?

We all know what time is. It's the ticking of a clock, the whine of an alarm, the calendar on the wall. And since we all agree about how those things work, time can seem as solid as a rock.

In fact, it's a lot more squishy. Our calendars are imperfect. We need a leap day to keep them in line with the seasons, and even so, time will eventually get away from us. "If you feel there aren't enough hours in a day, just wait," says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "In a few hundred million years, tidal friction will have slowed Earth's rotation to make the day 25 hours long."

If that doesn't make your head spin, consider that in physics, motion alters time; in psychology, different stimuli alter our perception of time; and in philosophy, there's disagreement on whether time is even real.

I attempted to find a few scholars that comment on what time is and compiled three or four of them through the following short quotes:
"From a gerontologist's standpoint, biological time is not wear-and-tear, it's a genetic program," says Michael West. "It's sort of like a time bomb. The cells are programmed to last just long enough for us to rear children, and no longer."

Thank goodness for spiritual counselors--and drugs. The Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister at Middle Collegiate Church in New York, says that while we may be most familiar with chronos, or clock time, we should also be aware of kairos, or God's time. "It's what the theologian [and Narnia author] C.S. Lewis called 'God's unbounded now,' where now is both this moment--right now--and what stretches into eternity." If you get frustrated waiting for your prayers to be answered, remember that "when God comes, it's always the right time."

Spiritual guide and alternative medicine expert Deepak Chopra, warns of the dangers of a hectic lifestyle.

"People who feel that they are 'running out of time' have speeded up their biological clocks," says Chopra. "They have faster heart rates and jittery platelets with high levels of adrenaline. When they drop dead from a premature heart attack, they have literally 'run out of time.'"

With so many definitions of time and so many aspects and characteristics of time, it is difficult to nail down a definition that is both universal and accurate. So my question is, beyond lengthy conditional definitions and philosophically accurate descriptions of time, what does time mean to you?