That was the open to the soap opera classic Day of our Lives.  The image of an hourglass, with sand slipping through the narrow tube, is impactful.  It is the constant reminder that time is elusive…always moving, impossible to hold, slipping through our fingers.

As a hungover friend once said, “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.”  A sobering thought indeed.

You can’t make more time.  True.  We can’t manufacture more time – we can’t go into the lab and put some chemicals together and produce new and improved time (some would argue time travel possibilities here, but we don’t have TIME for that.)  We can extend time – as the medical field does in the case of the very sick – in prolonging someone’s life, thereby creating more time than what was expected in one souls life span.

But time at its very core – is always present and never here.  It passes without thought or work.  Much as our breath goes in and out of our lungs…on automatic pilot.  We don’t “think” time into existence….it just is.  We can’t hold it, smell it or taste it.  We can only see it through the invention of clocks, calendars and various measuring devices.  Much like the ancients had the sundial to view the passing of time, we have our digital armband displays or our towering Big Ben monoliths.

Sometimes, we want time to pass quickly, and other times we want to freeze it – holding a precious moment tightly so it doesn’t escape us.  But time is ultimately a measure of the past and future.  The present comes and goes in the blink of an eye – and then we are left with the memory of what is gone and the thought of what is yet to be. 

I recently heard a man on the bus say something like you don’t want to do something because otherwise you were going to “spend your whole life…..” doing this or that (it was a morning commute, I wasn’t running on all cylinders yet.)  But my point is this – time is a commodity.  That bus-man said it – we can “spend our lives” doing something…hopefully putting it to good use, but that we can spend away our time, our one and only truly important resource.  “Time well spent” as the expression goes is what I think hungover friend was referring to….wanting to keep it, use it, enjoy it – because we can’t get more at Home Depot.  There is no aisle for Time.

It’s four simple letters…time…but it’s huge in how we measure our history, our lives and ultimately, ourselves.