The Wise Little Sofa

What is time? What a silly question! It’s like asking, “What is emptiness?” Whenever I walk into an empty room, I never see emptiness. Even if I looked into that empty room through a window from outside, I would still see my favorite old, very comfortable sofa. Oh, how I love that sofa! Of course, he’s getting on in years and has become very wise, but he’s been my friend since childhood.

Why is he wise? Well, recently I had to get up early and go about some very important business: searching for emptiness and time. There’s no point looking for them at lunchtime because the people in our little town get in the way. They’re always walking back and forth, and, of course, they scare emptiness away or chase it off. So I decided to get up very early, while everyone was still asleep, and go looking for emptiness.

But my wise sofa suggested that I enjoy one more wonderful dream about a delicious lunch. The Universe had prepared it especially for me! She had invited me to this magnificent feast and explained why I shouldn’t go looking for emptiness.

It turns out that emptiness is the most powerful thing in existence. It creates everything: planets, stars, worlds, universes, parallel universes, and even my sofa. If even a single atom enters emptiness, it has no idea where to go next. It gets pulled in every direction until it begins to tear apart. And as it tears apart, it unfolds into space. You all know what happens next: galaxies form, and eventually, of course, Earth appears, complete with my sofa. So, to prevent the parallel universes from becoming overcrowded with all the different versions of my sofas, someone hid emptiness from me.

Then I started imagining what would happen if I actually found emptiness. I could bring it home, for example, in a nice clean jar. Why not? A perfectly good container for emptiness!

So I’d bring it home and open the jar. And then an atom from my not-so-fresh, three-day-old soup might fly inside. This was the soup that had gone sour for the second time last week, after I forgot to put it in the fridge following a party I’d attended the month before. When I finally put it in the fridge, I forgot all about it for a year, and only last week did I happen to run into it again.

Anyway, what would happen if an atom like that flew into emptiness?

Oh dear! It would create an extremely sour universe! There would be smelly clusters of galaxies, a green sun, and absolutely no life, because I had already eaten all the meat from that soup back when I first cooked it.

So it’s a good thing someone hid emptiness from me.

After that dream, I got up and decided not to look for emptiness anymore. Instead, I would look for something.

And I found something in a pot. Nooo, not soup! Porridge! And there was no emptiness in it!

I was so happy!

Ever since then, I’ve been visiting my neighbors and checking their pots, pans, and refrigerators to make sure they don’t have any emptiness hiding inside. Unfortunately, my neighbors rarely let me into their homes. They say they don’t have time.

So I decided I needed to find some time of my own, so I would have time to visit my neighbors, and they would have time to welcome me.

Where didn’t I look for this elusive time!

People told me that time flows, so I searched beside a river and a lake. Once, I even turned on the tap and spent the entire day watching it, waiting to see whether time would come pouring out.

But it was all in vain.

One day, after a hearty dinner, my wise sofa grabbed me and sent me to sleep. In my dream, he explained that time is a kind of being that dies in emptiness, or in any other container where there’s nobody around.

Time needs observers. Time exists only because we are here — living creatures who take care of it and build little homes for it. Those homes are called clocks, and that’s where time lives.

There’s a whole family of time living in my house. I have a big grandfather clock, some medium-sized wall clocks, and lots of little time children living in my wristwatch, my phone, and other devices.

And the most important member of the time family is the calendar.

We must do everything we can to make sure time is never left alone. We mustn’t let it suffer from loneliness, because loneliness is the most terrible disease time can have.

So make sure your time is always running somewhere. People love making time go backward, and oh, how time hates that! It can’t stand it when people plunge it into the river of memories and force it to flow backward into the past.

Time also dislikes being played with. People keep moving it back an hour, then forward an hour, as if it were some kind of toy.

Whenever you feel bored, sad, or lonely, remember time. Remember that it needs you and that it needs to keep moving forward. If it stops running, it might go bad.

That’s why you need to take your time for walks, keep it fit, and feed it with activities, goals, and dreams. Time absolutely loves it when we have lots to do. That way, we’re constantly talking to it and keeping an eye on it.

And don’t worry if you feel you don’t have much time. I’ve never once run out of time! Even if I use every last bit of it during the day, time simply goes to sleep with me at night. And in the morning, it wakes up full of energy, ready to run really, really fast all over again.

Especially for me! Well, that is, once I finally get myself an alarm clock!

They say an alarm clock helps you have more time. What a magical little device!

And so, after my wise little sofa had told me absolutely everything about time, I woke up and immediately ran to my neighbors to tell them that I had found time — and that it was lunchtime right now!

✦

And a Couple More Revelations from the Little Sofa

There is no such thing as real time, just as a doughnut has no beginning. The time doughnut spins in one direction, while moving backward or forward along it depends on whether you place yourself on the outside or the inside of the doughnut. If you're on the outside of the time doughnut, you move forward together with time. But the moment you find yourself on the inside, you'll be upside down, and time will run in the opposite direction from you. So always stay on the outside of the doughnut!

Emptiness always seeks solitude, while time seeks the living. And that's how the great balance of all existence is maintained. If there are no living creatures left, time will disappear, and emptiness will swallow everything. But if someone finds emptiness and accidentally throws a sour atom into it, emptiness will disappear, and time will rule the universe! It will be everywhere, and life will exist everywhere!

Well, that's not a bad plan! I'll save the world! I'll introduce an imbalance and destroy the harmony of the universe for the sake of life!

All right, little sofa, don't get bored while I'm away. I'm going out to look for emptiness, and I've got a couple of liters of sour atoms!