Time is interesting to me of late. Perhaps it’s because I’m finally utilizing a calendar and it’s actually helping me to not forget meetings. Perhaps it is because I’m more aware of the days and seasons because of events that have unfolded over the last year or so. Perhaps it is simply because I’ve been so ridiculously busy that I’m more aware of how I’m occupying each of my days and I’m accepting the sacrifices I have to make to keep my head above water for at least long enough to breathe. All or none of these, it’s just something I’ve been mulling over.
One of the things that I have been thinking about is how, no matter what we do or say, time moves forward at exactly the same pace. Each second counting out the minutes counting out the hours, the days, the weeks and so on. I’m no scientist, nor am I a purist, so I’m not going to go into the kinds of anomalies with our clocks and calendars that make us, for instance, add a day every four years just to keep it right.
Rather, what interests me is our linguistic need to control time in ways that are really psychological tricks designed to give us the sense that we have some power over that which plods on, relentless and uncaring. It does not slow or speed up, it does not stop or wait. It just moves forward, the steady passing of moments that lead into ages.
We talk of the things that time does, and the language of control relating to time is so prevalent that I imagine few ever stop to think about it. No matter our words or thoughts, time can only ever move forward, endlessly marking the passing of our lives through our imperfect devices. We speak of it in words of control, as if to lessen the blow that there is this thing that controls us in every way and we have no power over it. It is unyielding in its march into eternity. Our language cannot change the fact that we cannot stop it, change it, manipulate it, or touch it...in any way.
We have it or we do not, as if it were a commodity, the latest fashion that needs our attention so that we can be cool. We save it as if it were money, as if it were something that could be gathered and set aside for a rainy day. We spend it, as if it were that same money and we have traded it for some moment dedicated to a task in which we find regret or satisfaction. We claim to make time – as if we were some grand artisan who could fashion such a thing from the unlikeliest of materials. We lose track of it, as if it were a small child momentarily slipping out of our sight in a crowded store. Sometimes, we find it again, easing our lives because we can accomplish that much more by clever manipulation. We speak of time management, as if we simply need to corral a cadre of workers in need of our guidance to become a well-oiled machine. We pass time like a quarterback to a wide receiver on a lazy Sunday afternoon in October. We have down time and leisure time; we have standard times and daylight savings times. We waste, take, run out of, bide, and ask for more time.
We even kill it.
Our language even gives time autonomy – breathing life into it so that perhaps we can learn how to bend it to our will, as we bend others to our wills during the course of any given day. Time flies, time crawls, time will tell, time heals, we can race it and be ahead or behind it,
We measure its value by our own standards, having and finding good times, lamenting the bad times, enjoying quality time, celebrating the perfect time; time can be wrong or right, time can be trivialized to be just a matter. Time goes by.
The Byrds and the Bible speak of time in much this way, telling us that there is a time to every purpose under the heaven. This may be true, but it is to the chagrin and pain of mankind that this moment will not be of our choosing, and we are ever the slaves of each tick of the clock, each shift of the sun, each tide of the ocean, each phase of the moon.
And what really gets us? The truth was told by an Irish actor and playwright by the name of Dion Boucicault.
“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them”
And with that, my time here has ended...
Be well, gentle readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment