These days, as the International Committee on Weights and Measures meets in France to redefine the second, the question of how we measure time, and why not, what we do with it, is once again redefined.

By consensus, it had been agreed that this SI unit of time is equivalent to the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium atom. Fortunately, however, we mere mortals never use this definition.

At the risk of seeming rambling, we'll leave that arduous description to the world of science. In times of zeal for detailed measurements, it's worth remembering that physicist Albert Einstein warned about the relativity of time. From his theoretical perspective, he explained that time moves at different speeds, depending on the observer's speed relative to the speed of light—a checkmate to the pretension of inherent accuracy.

All of us who have lived at least a second on this Earth know that time is relative. Is a second of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 the same as the time Paul Tibbets used to trigger the bomb he dropped on Hiroshima? Is a second spent farewelling to a loved one the same as a second spent waiting in line at a bank? Clearly not.

However, the question of how to measure time has been around for millennia. From the obelisks of ancient Egypt, used around 3500 BC, to the Greeks and their water clock, or clepsydra, to the Chinese with candle-based measuring instruments, and sand clocks that emerged from the 15th century onward, to the ones we wear on our wrists today.

On this side of the world, indigenous peoples also developed their own systems for measuring time, more closely related to holidays and nature. Proof of this is the imposing Intihuatana of the Incas, a stone sundial 1 to 2 meters high and 2 meters in diameter, standing at Machu Picchu.

In short, we could spend hours and hours talking about how humanity has measured and defined time. But perhaps the key is to focus on the moment when time became gold. Exactly at the point where any activity that doesn't generate profit—understood as gold—is seen as "wasting time." In fact, and it's a striking coincidence that the face of one of the icons of capitalism, the one that appears on the coveted $100 bill, is that of Benjamin Franklin, the very person who coined the phrase "time is money" in his 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman.

It's not enough to blame the famous phrase, because the truth is that it responded to an idea of ​​progress and linearity of time characteristic of the era that still persists and intensifies.

Eduardo Galeano already knew this when he wrote: “How strange are the civilized! They all have

clocks, and no one has time.” We might ask ourselves: How much time did humanity dedicate to measuring and making it productive, and what did it achieve? A good answer lies in the work of the Frankfurt School, which exposed modernity and exposed the dangers of its notions of reason and progress.

Can we measure how much boredom came over Vincent Van Gogh before he made the first brushstroke of The Starry Night? What clock will fit Julio Cortázar's observation

Theodore Adorno, his cat, before writing his most wonderful stories? And not to mention the hours Baruch Spinoza spent polishing lenses while spinning his most lucid philosophical thoughts.

In this race against time, losing track of time is gaining it. Creativity

The laughing being's own nature does nothing more than jump over the points on the timeline, dispersing them and reordering them chaotically at will.

In 1975, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi formulated his theory of flow and made this abundantly clear. For him, there is another kind of productivity, one where time is lost in absolute connection with what is being done. “Flow is a subjective state that people experience when they are completely involved in something, to the point of forgetting about time, fatigue, and everything else except the activity itself.” We could think of it as the closest thing to the formula for happiness of our times.

A baby who spends an entire afternoon trying to take his first step, a scientist absorbed in an intense day on the verge of an epiphany, or a writer euphorically jotting down ideas that flow like water. That, for Csikszentmihalyi, is happiness, where the experience is anchored in a timelessness or in the present.

Far from the obsession with not wasting time, the great figures who transcended the past with their works have allowed themselves to be lost in time, only able to see their timelessly incredible creations. In this sense, beyond redefining time, it would be much more productive to lose it.