Fall happens only in the morning, when we can see the brilliant hues of changing leaves and the displays of late-blooming perennial flowers. At night when all the leaves turn into the same dark silhouettes and breathe in oxygen like they do in every other part of the year, it is not fall. It is just another season, darker and colder than the one before.

The night is when the biological world seems to reject its persona. Every living organism takes on a mystical view of life where surrendering to impermanence becomes more important than survival. Color and color pattern that are integral to their survival during the day become trivial at night. Come dusk, they let go of their war paints and become less guarded. But so do the predators and prey that use colors and patterns to camouflage themselves in their game of hide and seek. They go quiet at night and let each other rest. The ones that still remain active take over the dark silhouettes and engage in a game where color means little.

It may be in the darkness of the night that we can experience the boundlessness of time. It may be that time is fettered to restlessness of the day, when all of nature is aware of itself and presents that awareness in color. Or it may be that time is the emotions that we experience, and not the mystery of the dark that we cannot define. How would I know? How can I know anything for sure!

Will I perceive some more aspects of time if I am awake through all the changing motion around me -- if I get lost in the colorful chaos during the day and am just as aware in the monochrome at night.

But, I want to sleep. I want to dream and then I want to wake up. But, I rarely seem to find that peace in sleep. Crashing when I am tired is barely the kind of freedom from disturbance I am looking for. Tranquility is only meaningful when you can consciously perceive it. You want to get there by chance and remain there in full awareness of your restful state. You want to lose your sense of time. And it is only in that absence of time that there is tranquility.

Time can't be the same for everyone and I mean this quite literally in a very unimaginative, plain-vanilla sort of a way. This is unlike all the exciting academic and fictional talks that consider alternate time theories.

For instance, I am not conjecturing what life might have been like if time were a circle, or moved backwards, or stood still, or was absolute. I might speculate what a world would be like if there were many possible outcomes to one event all being experienced at the same time, but where it is hard to say if effect precedes cause or cause precedes effect! I might want sometimes for time to slow down or move faster and have my body time supersede mechanical time. I might want time to flutter and fly away until a point where there is no time and people have no memories.

But, we are here now -- where nothing is clear, everything is imperfect and incomplete, and time is eternally changing even before what we do now can develop into a whole -- because it all seems to stop every night!

It is almost like time is color and it is only in color that we can sense the changing rhythm of our lives. It is only in color that our nonexistent future is visible, just like it is in the absence of color (in black and white and many shades of grey) that we see the time that has passed. Either that or our past becomes the nostalgia of the present and presents itself rosily. Even so, nostalgia is somewhat quantifiable in time. It is only in our dreams that we can completely lose track of time, which may be why we can never remember if we dreamt in color or not.