Out Of Time

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”

                                                                                                                  - James Joyce

Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it? Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Wow, there are a lot of questions, and yet to fully answer all of those we would just scratch the surface. We could listen to the Chicago song, but that really wouldn't answer the question, would it? It is a good song, though.

Time is really a rather intimate subject. Most of us deal with time on a planetary basis, dictated by Earth's axial revolutions and associated wobbles, in conjunction with its seasonal orbiting of Old Sol. That alone is a fascinating subject, once you realize that the data from over 50 atomic clocks representing 58 countries are analyzed in a laboratory near Paris in order to create the standard known as Coordinated Universal Time. UTC is its popular title. Yeah, I realize the anagram doesn’t match up, but we are talking about Europe. And here you thought Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was the standard. Sorry, Great Britain – your Greenwich Observatory is nice and all, but GMT is so 1960s.

I have always been fascinated with time. It would be so cool to travel in time. Would you like to time travel? You can, you know. Let’s do that right now, weather permitting. Look up at the sky on the first clear night you encounter, and you will see light that was generated by billions of stars, some possibly centuries ago. 

Look out your window on a sunny day. It took 20 minutes for that light to reach your backyard. Shadows should be an object of loathing! That light from our very own sun traveled nearly 93 million miles to give brilliant illumination to our world, only to have it blocked by a tree, or a telephone pole, or maybe even YOU!  I bet you feel guilty now, don’t you?

I really enjoy a discussion of physics, as long as the required math isn’t involved. The question of time was explored more than once in the wonderful Science Channel series “Through the Wormhole,” hosted by Morgan Freeman. If you are so inclined, here is an entire episode about time on YouTube: 

My concern in this blog entry is more with the psychological aspects of time. It is the concept of time  that most of us answer to. It is the circadian rhythm, it is the biological clock, and it is the social expectations of the ever-moving hands of time. Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives. Sounds like a good name for a TV show is in there somewhere.

For me, 50 years old me has faded in the rear-view mirror, and the big six-0 is visible within my high beams. Each new year is a but a blur of days turning into a blur of months, with my wife and I usually wondering just where the heck the past month disappeared to. While an easy answer isn't forthcoming, just why this phenomenon occurs is easily explained.

When I was a kid, I LOVED Christmastime. Didn't most of us? It seemed like it took forever for it to finally arrive. The fact that my very old-school parents wouldn’t put up out REAL Christmas tree until Christmas Eve made time seem to pass even more slowly. 

Summer vacation was similar. It took forever to arrive. While I liked school, I loved the freedom of summer vacation!

As we age, time seems to pass quickly. My 30 year teaching career came and went with ever increasing velocity.

Okay, I am finally getting to that explanation I mentioned four paragraphs ago. As you age, each day, month and year becomes an ever smaller part of your overall life experience. To an eight-year-old, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas seems to take forever! Well, it really is to him or her. Clearly, 1% of an eight-year-old’s life has passed between those two holidays.

Now, let’s look at your run-of-the-mill 59-year-old. That same 30 days (yeah, I know it isn’t always 30 days) between Thanksgiving and Christmas is barely 1/10th of 1%! It is such a tiny part of his or her lifetime that the perception is that time has flown by.

This isn’t always the case. Adults can experience the perceived slowing of time. Early in the fall of my last year of teaching, I lost one of my students.  He was killed in an automobile accident. During that horrible week, time seemed to slow to a crawl. I just wanted to get it over with, but my perceived time painfully moved at a snail's pace.

Time and I have usually been on speaking terms. During my teaching career, I liked to arrive at school by 7:05 AM, or else I felt rushed all day. It was great to arrive early, make whatever copies I needed for the day, get all of my material ready, and then have the opportunity to socialize with the other staff members as they arrived at school. The staff wasn't required to be there until 7:50 AM, but that was far too late for me and for several others. I cherished that social time with my fellow teachers and other staffers.

Let's shift mental gears, though mine are sometimes stuck in park. Anyhow, I love all of the shows in the Star Trek TV series except for the original. Hey, I DO appreciate that the original series paved the way for all of the others, and for all of the movies, but the original Star Trek just wasn’t that great. If you watched it back in 1966, it was awesome. However, by today’s standards, it was… well, kind of lame. BUT...the spinoffs dealt with temporal anomalies and even a “temporal cold war.” Like we really needed a NEW cold war! The big difference here was instead of nuclear weapons, we had to deal with time travel, time spies, and even scarier weapons.  

Still, the concept of alternate realities is tantalizingly plausible. Maybe all of time past, present and future exists around us in different time dimensions. Each one results from decisions we make in our individual lives. Every decision then branches out into brand new time lines. Hey, it's just a thought.

Since time is of the essence, the older we get, the less time we have left on this planet, I highly recommend that you not put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Quit reading this, turn off your computer, and go interact with people you enjoy interacting with. I also suggest that you let loved ones know that they are indeed loved. What could possibly be a more important use of our time than that?