“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” —Jorge Luis Borges

The passage of the sun and stars across the skies gave rise to clocks that measure the turn of one rotation of the Earth on its axis. However, modern atomic clocks measure time on the basis of vibrational frequencies found in atoms and molecules. As a result, we have discovered that the spin of the Earth is not in perfect time. It slows a bit and then speeds up again by about a second every now and then.

In order to catch up with ourselves, by international agreement we insert leap seconds into our calendar every now and then, as often as twice a year. Frequently, one extra moment arrives, with little fanfare, at midnight on June 30.

Time, by which we measure eternity, has just been stretched into one more second. Do any of us feel the richer? Time inside us ticks to its own clock. We compress or expand time with our consciousness.

We cannot truly stretch eternity by even one second.

But we can truly encompass all eternity in one moment: the present.