weltweit
Well-Known Member
A short story of a personal experience that led me to this belief.
I was riding a motorbike into a village at about 60mph not paying too much attention to anything when suddenly a red sportscar arriving in front of me from the left, pulled out into the road into my path and stopped right in front of me covering my lane perhaps 20-30 yards away.
My first thought was that as it had stopped, blocking my path, perhaps I could quickly swerve around its front and avoid collision, so I started to think about swerving the bike to the right. As I was thinking this, another car appeared coming from the other direction and cut off that line of escape.
I realised with an awful certainty that I was going to hit the sportscar at 60mph and would probably die. I thought that is it for me, game over, in the next fractions of a second the game is up, I will be dead.
Travelling as fast as I was, I covered the ground towards the car very quickly but as I contemplated the absolute certainty of my own death I realised, although I was about to die, I was not dead yet so perhaps there was something I could do to save my life.
I thought hard and my mind seemed very clear as it started to search for solutions.
Time itself appeared to almost stand still as I thought. I had time to search back through memories years old, I thought of skidding the rear tyre, sliding around and hitting the car broadside but discarded this as I knew I did not have the time to get my foot onto the rear brake. I had not even time to reach my fingers from around the twistgrip to even slightly squeeze the front brake to slow myself down as I was approaching the accident so fast.
Time still seemed to be going very very slowly, tiny fractions of a second taking minutes or hours to pass as I tried to find a way to save myself.
I searched my memories again and again, there must be a way to save myself because I was not ready to die, not yet, not right at this moment not in the next nanosecond when the inevitable collision was going to happen.
Eventually after searching most of my brain's contents as I hurtled toward the sports car in seeming slow motion I did find a memory that could help me.
I remembered that about two years before I had been fascinated by an article written in a bike magazine by a Scandinavian stunt rider. The article was quite long and I recalled it all, sifting through that specific memory I found one sentence that could help me. The stunt rider had said:
“If you are going to hit a car, stand up!”
I processed that thought, decided it could help to save me, and my fractions of a second that had seemed like hours or more started to come to an end, I started to stand up on the footpegs and the bike and I hit the car.
My mind went completely blank, nothing, not even black, as if I had been switched off like a light.
After some time I started to feel again and found myself on my face in the road some distance away from the car. My act of standing up had meant that I had pretty much flown over the handlebars and completely over the car avoiding hitting any of it and eventually ending up in the road some distance from the scene of the accident.
The point of this story is that during that event, which in total took only a second or two at the most, far less time than you have taken reading this far, time really did almost stand still for me, there is no other way I would have happened on that memory of the single sentence in the article I had read years before unless I had sufficient time to search all my memory banks, to dig and trawl for something, anything, that could help me in my moment of greatest need.
So in conclusion, TIME IS NOT ALWAYS LINEAR.
One second does not always take one second to pass, sometimes it can take a minute or much longer if needed.
Discuss.
I was riding a motorbike into a village at about 60mph not paying too much attention to anything when suddenly a red sportscar arriving in front of me from the left, pulled out into the road into my path and stopped right in front of me covering my lane perhaps 20-30 yards away.
My first thought was that as it had stopped, blocking my path, perhaps I could quickly swerve around its front and avoid collision, so I started to think about swerving the bike to the right. As I was thinking this, another car appeared coming from the other direction and cut off that line of escape.
I realised with an awful certainty that I was going to hit the sportscar at 60mph and would probably die. I thought that is it for me, game over, in the next fractions of a second the game is up, I will be dead.
Travelling as fast as I was, I covered the ground towards the car very quickly but as I contemplated the absolute certainty of my own death I realised, although I was about to die, I was not dead yet so perhaps there was something I could do to save my life.
I thought hard and my mind seemed very clear as it started to search for solutions.
Time itself appeared to almost stand still as I thought. I had time to search back through memories years old, I thought of skidding the rear tyre, sliding around and hitting the car broadside but discarded this as I knew I did not have the time to get my foot onto the rear brake. I had not even time to reach my fingers from around the twistgrip to even slightly squeeze the front brake to slow myself down as I was approaching the accident so fast.
Time still seemed to be going very very slowly, tiny fractions of a second taking minutes or hours to pass as I tried to find a way to save myself.
I searched my memories again and again, there must be a way to save myself because I was not ready to die, not yet, not right at this moment not in the next nanosecond when the inevitable collision was going to happen.
Eventually after searching most of my brain's contents as I hurtled toward the sports car in seeming slow motion I did find a memory that could help me.
I remembered that about two years before I had been fascinated by an article written in a bike magazine by a Scandinavian stunt rider. The article was quite long and I recalled it all, sifting through that specific memory I found one sentence that could help me. The stunt rider had said:
“If you are going to hit a car, stand up!”
I processed that thought, decided it could help to save me, and my fractions of a second that had seemed like hours or more started to come to an end, I started to stand up on the footpegs and the bike and I hit the car.
My mind went completely blank, nothing, not even black, as if I had been switched off like a light.
After some time I started to feel again and found myself on my face in the road some distance away from the car. My act of standing up had meant that I had pretty much flown over the handlebars and completely over the car avoiding hitting any of it and eventually ending up in the road some distance from the scene of the accident.
The point of this story is that during that event, which in total took only a second or two at the most, far less time than you have taken reading this far, time really did almost stand still for me, there is no other way I would have happened on that memory of the single sentence in the article I had read years before unless I had sufficient time to search all my memory banks, to dig and trawl for something, anything, that could help me in my moment of greatest need.
So in conclusion, TIME IS NOT ALWAYS LINEAR.
One second does not always take one second to pass, sometimes it can take a minute or much longer if needed.
Discuss.
