I think time should be measured by days, and today is always day zero. 

The calendar keeps reminding us of how far we are from the past, how soon the future will be here, and that days come around again. Your birthday. Independence day. New Year's day, Christmas Day, Anniversaries. 

We are not ruled by people, we are ruled by the words people say. That goes for ourselves. We speak to ourselves in our heads in the words we think we are thinking. In the voice of who we think we are. And we do our best to conform to the person we want to be ... based on the desires, the hopes, and the fears of those people who have been speaking to us all our lives. The words of family, the words of media, words from TV, Youtube, Instagram ... words we understand in the context of who we are. 

But who are we really? It is now. Every day we regain consciousness, move through a series of steps that define the substance of our lives, do things, watch things, talk about things, then settle down and lose consciousness again. That's today. 

I want to start over. Everyday. The year is a construct. The month is a fable, named for a god, or an emperor, or a season. It's a word that is meaningful only in a culture that assumes that everyone knows the same sense of the planet earth. That is still bound by the history of lost empires, ancient religions, and a dizzying array of assumptions.
Like meditation can be a moment to quiet the mind and a pause in assuming the mind can only follow well worn paths, so reckoning time in a different way is a pause in assuming that the world really cares what the date is. What year it is. What time it is here, or there, or around the world. These are conventions. 

Time is not really a convention. Time is personal. Time is created by consciousness. It is the only thing created by consciousness in fact, because if consciousness hasn't created it, it doesn't exist, and you the Being in question is not in fact conscious to do anything else. And I take it back... Consciousness creates time alright, but it is not a "thing". It is the only experience which is not a thing, it is rather the necessary condition for experience, and that condition which makes cognition of consciousness itself possible. Through seeing anything, we are present for presence itself. 

Counting days reminds me of this. When I was in 14, I wanted a stardate system, like on Star Trek. I had seen some people make up systems that encoded dates, months and years into a stardate-sounding system, but I wanted a "real" one. So I used my access to a computer (through a teletype, this was 1974) to divide the 24 hours of the day into 100 equal segments, and used that as the basis of my stardate. Every day added 100 to a number, a decimal point allowed pinpointing a moment, and every day you just keep incrementing.
As I fleshed out my own galaxy (that one you can't see in the sky, but you could in my notebook) I realized that years and months would become cumbersome, when going between planets, between star systems. But each person had a personal sense of a day, that time between waking up and going to sleep. Every day, adding another one. 

So every day is unique. And it is day zero. Every day I have lived another day. I am one day further from my birth. I am one day closer to my death. I am one day further from the last great extinction. I am one day further from the formation of the earth. I am one day closer to completing my next project. I am one day closer to everything that is to come. 

Everyone who lives as long as I have will have a 22,000'th day. Every day that will come after will be equally unique. Each will continue to be a smaller and smaller percentage of my life. Each resonates with all the things that I have done, and all that has been done to me, around me, and without me in every day previous. All life exists only in the day zero that is today, the moment zero that is now. The other names we give to time are fanciful, pregnant with cultural implication ... but it is only our intention in repeating those implications in our minds now that makes them real. 

I am a phenomenologist. To understand, it is useful to step back, and separate what is real from what is believed. Memory is useful, but it requires a presence in the mind now. In phenomenology, the crucial step is that stepping back. It has a special name, an Epoché, or in Greek: ἐποχή. It means to abstain from judgement, just to observe. Not even implying that an experience is outside of us, and there is an observer "inside" our bodies. Rather, it is a bracketing of any and all suppositions. Experience unfolds, and I have not even distinguished the experience from the experiencer. Now is happening. And it happens in time which is only, purely mine. It is not me, What I am and what the world is meets in Now. The arc of nows I experience between waking and sleeping, is a day. Thank you, for another day in the perfect world, with you. May the grace of Being flow through every one of your days, and may your awareness distinguish what you see from the distractions of grammatical entanglements.