Time
“Like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”
That was the open to the soap opera Days of our Lives. The image of the hourglass, as the sand slips through the narrow tube, is impactful. It is the constant reminder that time is elusive…always moving, impossible to hold, slipping through our fingers.
God, that sounds depressing lol. I don’t mean it to be. I think time – and its concept – is actually very fascinating.
As a hungover Seamus recently said to me, my sister and Rich at the diner one Saturday morning in Connecticut, “you can always make more money, but you can’t make more time” (can’t remember exactly what he was referencing but it struck me nonetheless.)
You can’t make more time. True. We can not manufacture more time – we can’t go into the lab and put some chemicals together and produce time (some would argue time travel possibilities here, but they’re nerds and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.) We can prolong time – as the medical field often 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 a 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 (I was obviously half asleep on the way to work.) 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 Seamus was refering 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.
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