It flies and flows and creeps. You measure it, spend it, waste it. It’s on your side, or it’s not. We’re talking about time, and so is the Rubin Museum of Art, one of the biggest-thinking small museums in Manhattan. The Rubin is devoting its entire 2018 season and all six floors of galleries in Chelsea to time as a theme, with an accent on the future, a future which is making some of us nervous these days.

If you’re a Buddhist — and much of the historical art at the Rubin is Buddhist, from the Himalayas — time is an especially complex subject because it’s not linear. It’s layered and cyclical, with past, present and future snarled up together. And that’s the way the Rubin presents it. So where to begin?

I started at the admissions desk where, along with my ticket, I was handed a letter handwritten by an earlier visitor. (You’re invited to write a “Letter to a Future Visitor” of your own before you leave.) Mine was from someone named Bill who suggested I start my time-travel on the sixth floor with the exhibition called “The Second Buddha: Master of Time.”