I had a really boring day at work today, time dragged. And as I stood, waiting for customers, wanting something desperately to do as the seconds seemed to move like hours, it struck me that time has very little to do with what a clock measures. As Henry MacKay noted “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.”
The past is time spent, the future is time waiting to happen. Tomorrow never comes and yesterday never comes back. So is time, as Science Fiction writer Ray Cummings wrote in 1922 “what keeps everything from happening at once?”
Our ancestors “used” time as a measuring system to sequence events and a way of marking the duration of events and intervals between. Our first method of recording time was conceived of 6000 years ago with Lunar Calendars, with the first clocks arriving in Egypt in 1500 BC as a primitive form of sundial.
Since these pioneering days of study into the understanding of the effects of our own planets relationship to its satellites, our relationship with time itself has slipped out of context like a Dali clock face.
We just don’t know what to do with it. It’s a slack idea that no one can seem to agree on. There are those who want to save time, and others who want to kill it. You can take it and be rewarded, but to be paid you must give it. No one has free time; it must be spent. Only if something is timeless, can it become priceless.
If we get our timing right we will succeed from our own merit, but we must be in the right place at the right time (coincidence is out of our control) to meet with success. Is time happening to us, or are we happening to time here?
Prisoners are often referred to as serving (the master of time) or doing time. But aren’t we all doing time? The only real difference between those who are free and those who are incarcerated is space, but no one ever refers to jail as “not doing space’
People are either running out of time, or have too much time on their hands. We are either bored, not knowing what to do with time, or stressed, with no time at all.
What is the time? Can numbers in a watch face account for their not being enough hours in the day?
Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide philosophers. Newtonian Time views time as part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension all of it’s own in which events occur in sequence. Thus, time travel becomes as possible (theoretically) as pushing fast forward or rewind on a remote, as all time exists “like frames of a film strip, spread out across the timeline.”
The view I take, and the opposing argument, is that time is part of our own fundamental intellectual structure. As Immanuel Kant argued, “time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.”
The only gift time has to offer, it would seem, is the present.
A weird thing just happened, as I was writing my I-tunes player shuffled onto the Moloko tune The Time is now – just thought I would share. It’s not paranormal if you don’t share; it’s paranoid.
A good place to end; time out!
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