I think the problem with understanding time is physiological.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is as the present going past to future. Codified as measures of duration.

The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this presence, as events coalesce and dissolve.

It's like trying to explain the sun and stars going east to west, before understanding the planet is turning west to east.

There is no dimension of time, block time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

It's like a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That cultures are about synchronizing society as some larger entity, based on the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem there should be a universal flow of time, but we don't all march to the beat of the same drummer.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Lives go birth to death, future to past, as life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old, past to future.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

As it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle, it would seem the mind is more arbiter and focus of consciousness, than its source. More radio, than radio waves.

Galaxies are essentially energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, though exploring the implications of that tends to stir up too much academic sediments.

As these linear, goal seeking creatures in this circular, cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, we haven't quite internalized the implications of the earth being round, not flat.

Still pretty much beating our chests, throwing stones and worshipping Bronze Age deities.

The logical flaw of which, is that ideals are not absolutes.