a second reflection...'time'

This morning I said in passing to my elderly neighbour, who was taking out the trash (this is when our paths always seem to cross): ‘shame about the rain’.  It has been hot and dry recently.  She put her black bin bags in the trash can and said: ‘that’s life’.  And it’s true – in life sometimes it rains, sometimes it pours, sometimes the sun shines through. 

She then asked if I got the community magazine she put through my door.  I said I did, although I wasn’t sure.  ‘There’s lots of things going on around here you can go along to’, she said (lots of life, she meant).  Maybe I thought, but I haven’t the time.  That’s life as well – having time, or lack of it for living.

I remember one of my old bosses used to describe herself as ‘time poor’.  She worked as the editor for one of the local newspapers – hard.  At the time I thought when she said she was ‘time poor’ it really alluded to the fact she had her priorities in life and for living all wrong.

One of my favourite sentences about life and time ever written is as follows  - ‘time is a jet plane, it moves to fast’.  It continues, ‘oh but what a shame, all we’ve shared can’t last’.

Another is – ‘the past is now part of my future, and the present is out of hand’.

I guess the nature of time can make prioritising bits and pieces of life, and deciding which ones to live, difficult.

~

You see, Old Father Time: he seems almost a benevolent character nowadays (witness his statue at Lord’s cricket ground etcetera), yet in reality he remains at least a pain in the arse, or worse, a supreme inconvenience (Ok, sometimes a luxury – but not often).

Indeed, there are several misnomers people attribute to time.  One is that time heals.  Nope, not necessarily.  Rather memory deteriorates or time simply brings the weight of recrimination and regret, sadness and hopelessness into sharper relief, or to bear more heavily (jolly good!).

And if you’ve spent the remains of your savings on an expensive watch, one of those giant ones racing drivers model when they aren’t pretending to endorse the benefits of Cash ISAs, and then scratched the thing soon after purchase, time weighs heavily too, if indeed it didn’t already.

Time is money.

Money can’t, it turns out, buy you time…

…Now let’s go on a reverse tangent.

Yesterday, a man came into work to talk to us about our pensions.  Pensions?  I am twenty nine for chrissakes!  I’ve got loads of time before I retire, or die.

Or have I?

Who knows where the time goes? Especially when we (are preparing to) leave God’s good earth.

God:  it took him seven days alone to create the earth and all living things in (on?) it, thereby undermining the fundamentals of Science in centuries to come.  Science, of course, in the meantime has succeeded in undermining the fundamentals of God.

(Score draw?)

It is interesting, to me at least, that an ‘Act of God’ remains to this day a recognised legal term for events outside of human control, such as sudden floods or other natural disasters, for which no one can be held responsible.

Recently I got my car insured.  Sure enough in the small print my new friends at the car insurance company insist that while I am insured for everything from my monkey antecedents at the wildlife sanctuary snapping off my windscreen wipers, to a hooded (surely) young (surely) and disenfranchised (surelybutwhosefaultisthatreally?) vandal smashing in my windshield, I am expressly not insured for the aforementioned Acts of God.

If in my motor vehicle I run into a plague of locusts, or encounter a fording river of blood somewhere deep in the Welsh countryside, I am in trouble. 

~

You know something - I do wonder if death is an Act of God?  Or a consequence of time?  Whether age is a state of mind?  Or, again, an inevitability of time?

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time largely makes for exasperating reading, but there is one observation worth a mention by the by.  Namely this   - light is affected by gravity.

So it’s easier to fall over yourself, or drop things, in the dark.

However, wait there!  Further revelations are at hand (beyond Hawking). 

Today I read the average commuter in the US loses 38 hours a year as a result of being delayed in traffic - I suppose their loss in time is Howard Stern’s gain; and I also read, if I can make this leap and/or association, that time in the era of the dinosaur(s) was shorter, a day being only 23 hours in length.

‘The years are too short, the days are too long’.  One of the great, if not greatest writer of the 21^st century said this in his book Something Happened. It is a book primarily about time. 

So many things, however, are about time – it is after all seemingly unavoidable, in the same moment elliptical.  Old Father Time is a constant bleedin’ enigma.  The philosophical and metaphysical equivalent of folk-cum-singer Bob Dylan.

In this short (albeit somewhat time consuming) reflection, I have already quoted Bob Dylan.  Time was and has been a constant preoccupation for him too.  Perhaps one of this most enduring songs (ha) is called Most of the Time.  In it he reflects that most of the time he is alright, getting by, in doing so implying there are other times he isn’t. 

To paraphrase Dylan and Abraham Lincoln as to why time is so bothersome to human beings: all people can be alright some of the time, some people alright all of the time, but all people can’t be alright all of the time.

That is why we get by part of the time, but not most, let alone all of the time.

Time is inconsistent; it has a spastic continuum.

People the same. 

So, how can either party anticipate which one is going to affect the other next?  Which is presumably why we assert there can be no tomorrow; but if the past is part of the future, then perhaps we need better understand a bit of what is happening now.

Time is all around us people around.  

I repeat often to myself: be mindful of this!