Time

A child comes in, “Can I have a popsicle?” Adult who is fixing dinner, “No, dinner is in fifteen minutes.”

Two minutes later, “Is dinner ready?”

“No, I said fifteen minutes.”

Two minutes later, “Is dinner ready…”

When we give a small child a time frame for something we might as well tell them to go taste the number nine. It literally makes no sense to them. As we grow older we, hopefully, begin to grasp the passage of time. If children don’t have an increasing concept of time they are destined for difficulty. Their teachers say, “You have ten minutes to finish this quiz.” Unless the child has a concept of ten minutes they have no mental framework of how fast to work.

An employer says, “I need that done by three o’clock.” The employee who doesn’t grasp time well is headed for unemployment.

As adults we think we have a good grasp of time, then we read about Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and suddenly we’re in a thought world where time is the fourth dimension and is warped by gravity. I don’t know about you but I simply don’t have the mental capacity to grasp spacetime. It’s beyond my ability to understand that and I also have no idea what the taste of the number nine is. One makes as much sense as the other. I’m trying though.

In one sense, I understand that time is an artificial construct. We have decided what we mean by seconds, minutes, days, etc. Nevertheless, we know time is real. No matter how we name the segments, there is always a definable gap between now and then. We know time has to pass before dinner is ready.

Anticipation is both a blessing and a curse. Anticipation allows us to enjoy something before it actually occurs. I try to get this column in on Friday before it’s published the following week. This week though, I have to have it done on Thursday because I have an event beginning Friday which I’m looking forward to. I certainly don’t want to wish my life away but I’m eager for the hours to go by so I finally arrive at the time I want it to be. I have the blessing of anticipated happiness and the curse of not yet.

I suppose it’s a good thing we don’t have much capacity to grasp cosmic time. It would be severely disorienting. Our galaxy is moving through space at 1.3 million miles per hour. The Earth is orbiting the Sun at an average speed of 67,000 miles per hour, or 18.5 miles per second. We don’t feel it, of course, because we’re moving with it. Were it to suddenly stop we’d be goners.

What that realization can do for us is give us perspective. The next day, hour, minute, moment is both fleeting and valuable. We can do something, we can rest, but whatever we do it is part of existence that will be quickly gone forever.