A Conversation Between Peter Witz and Dr. Graves on The Shape of Time

A Conversation Between Peter Witz and Dr. Graves on The Shape of Time

Peter Witz: Dr. Graves, I’ve always struggled with time. On one hand, it’s something we can measure with precision—seconds, hours, years. But on the other, it refuses to stay in those neat boxes. An hour can crawl like a lifetime, while a decade can vanish in the blink of an eye. Is time really a single, consistent thing, or is it many things at once?

Dr. Graves: A timeless question, Peter. Science describes time as a system of measurement: the swing of a pendulum, the orbit of Earth around the sun, the tick of an atomic clock. This is the scaffolding, the agreed-upon structure. Yet what humans actually experience is different. Time is not only external—it bends inside us. It stretches in awe, compresses in routine, and disappears entirely in wonder.

Peter Witz: So we live in two times at once—the measurable and the perceptible.

Dr. Graves: Precisely. And different cultures have honored different faces of time. To the mathematician, it is a line. To the mystic, a circle. To the poet, a spiral. None of these are wrong. They are metaphors, each pointing to a truth. The mistake is assuming time must be one shape, when in truth it may be all of them.

Peter Witz: I think of childhood summers. They seemed endless, wide as oceans. Each day was thick with discovery. Now, as an adult, entire years slip past as though they never happened. Why does time accelerate as we grow older?

Dr. Graves: Because novelty stretches time, Peter. When you are young, every experience is new. The mind records the details: the taste of fruit, the sound of a storm, the strangeness of unfamiliar streets. Days feel vast because they are packed with memory. With age, routine collapses experience. The mind abbreviates, compressing repetition into memory’s shorthand. Days blur, years vanish. It is not that time has quickened, but that memory has thinned.

Peter Witz: Then perhaps we are not prisoners of time—we are its sculptors. If time shrinks when we stop paying attention, maybe the opposite is true as well.

Dr. Graves: Just so. The art of reclaiming time lies in reclaiming awareness. To seek out novelty, to pursue learning, to walk unfamiliar paths—these acts stretch perception. A single day lived in awareness can feel longer than a year lived on autopilot. The secret is not in lengthening life, but in deepening it.

Peter Witz: Yet no matter how fully we live, time still leads to the same precipice: death. The final cliff. How do we make peace with that?

Dr. Graves: Here lies the paradox. Death is not merely the end of time, it is what gives time meaning. Without an ending, life would dissolve into monotony. A story without a conclusion is not a story at all—it is chaos. Mortality does not erase life’s worth; it frames it.

Peter Witz: So death is not time’s enemy, but its companion?

Dr. Graves: Exactly. What terrifies us is not time itself, but wasted time. We fear the unfinished novel, the song cut off mid-phrase, the life lived without purpose. Cultures respond by creating rituals. Anniversaries, funerals, memorials—these give shape to endings. They transform mortality into meaning, making the invisible visible.

Peter Witz: Then rituals are a way of weaving time into memory.

Dr. Graves: Indeed. They proclaim: this life mattered, this moment endures. Rituals anchor meaning in the flow of time, extending memory beyond a single lifespan. Through them, the living converse with the past and leave a path for the future.

Peter Witz: If so, then time is not a single path but many threads. The clock is one thread, memory another, ritual another. Perhaps eternity itself is woven through the tapestry.

Dr. Graves: A beautiful vision, Peter. Time as tapestry, with threads bright and dark, strong and fragile. From inside the weave, the pattern is invisible. Only in rare moments—through awe, through love, through silence—do we glimpse the whole.

Peter Witz: Which makes those glimpses all the more precious.

Dr. Graves: Yes. Time gives us glimpses, but never the entire design. That is part of its mystery. The task is not to see the entire pattern, but to live your thread with integrity, with presence, with care.

Peter Witz: Then maybe the question is not “What is time?” but “What will I weave with it?”

Dr. Graves: Precisely, Peter. Time is not just what passes through us. It is what we leave behind within it. And that is where immortality lives—not in escaping time, but in shaping it so that others remember.