It seems, of late, there are no clocks in my house that work. Not one tells the right time. It has taken me awhile to realize it, and even now I couldn’t tell you which of the several clocks scattered around the house are fast and which are slow, or by how much. All I know is that whenever I think I know what time it is, I’m wrong.
For someone who is partial to punctuality, this situation has me more than puzzled. I’m ticked.
To date, I have changed the batteries in the big round clock on the kitchen wall at least twice and reset the clock radio on the nightstand more times than that. I have fixed the clock in the car as well, but this normally reliable time-teller is still off.
Then there’s my watch, recently back from a three-week rehab at the manufacturer’s (Danish, no less!), and still not working right. Even the expensive clock I took from the home of my dear departed Uncle (after his departure, of course) whose coordinates are beamed down via satellite, is not giving me the correct time.
I am nonplussed. If you can’t trust a satellite…?
How strange this sudden and sweeping breakdown of all my time-telling tools. Mere coincidence? I, of course, think not. This can’t be about replacing timepieces or restocking the lot of double “A”s.
Here’s the message I’m getting: When it comes to time, I should just forget about it. Cease caring. Since I feel like I never have enough anyway, it might do me a whole lot of good to stop counting it.
Let it go, says the voice in my head. Seconds, minutes, hours; what difference does it make? Even Einstein said time was an illusion. “There is only this moment,” declare the teachers whose books line my shelves. If we’ve only got this one; then, obviously, it’s the right one.
So, whether it’s 2:43 or 6:26; GMT or Daylight Savings; whether I’m waking up in the Colorado Rockies or in Hoboken, New Jersey—be present, I remind myself. Be in the moment.
If I can just get this one critical piece of timeless wisdom—I mean really live it—then, whatever time it happens to be, the moment is all mine.
Sixties Chick 
June 6, 2012 at 3:14 pm |
Timely . . .as always!!! 😉
June 6, 2012 at 4:01 pm |
Loved your allusion to time by being ‘ticked’…
We’re always in the moment…you and I and everyone are always living in the NOW…
We can’t go back, and we can’t go forward…
We’re stuck in the ever changing NOW…
Need more time?…
Time is Only an Illusion
Time, as we know it, is only an illusion. We usually think of time as having three parts – Past, Present, Future. But what is the Past – only a collection of memories. We can’t experience the Past, we can only remember it. And we can only remember it in the Present (furthermore, our memories are noticeably unreliable). There is no objective thing that we call the Past; it can’t be measured in any way; our only contact with it is in the Present.
And what is the Future – only a mental construct in the Present. We can’t experience the Future until it “becomes” the Present. Until then it only a hope and dream. We can project what the Future may be like, but we are considerably less accurate than when we remember the Past. There is no objective thing that we call the Future; it can’t be measured in any way; our only contact with it is in the Present.
That leaves us with only the Present – the ever changing Present. Time is an illusion we created to try and measure the rate of change of the Present. It’s always NOW. But it’s an ever changing NOW. In a effort to cope with the change, we have invented time. It’s a handy mental device that helps us deal with the higher order derivatives of the rate of change.
KBL
June 6, 2012 at 5:26 pm |
Whew!
June 8, 2012 at 1:22 am |
Whether it’s an illusion or not, it still goes too fast for my liking.