When I returned to college, after twenty years of being a stay-at-home-mom, the first course I took was in general physical science with Dr. Yingling. And one of the first things he did was to take us to look at the replica of Faucault's Pendulum in the science building.
The second thing he did was to ask, "So, what is time?" There were lots of answers, most of them personal and specific. "Yes, but what is it? What is time?"
Finally he explained that time is, for most of us, a relative thing, insubstantial, necessary, loved and hated. His own definition was certainly insubstantial, I felt, but after many years of considering it, his answer was also the best.
Time is measured duration. We measure most things in life, and the duration of time is one of them. Consider how many of those measurements we use all the time: seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries. Pulse and heartbeats. Steps and miles.
When we were little children, we thought Christmas would never come. How many days before Santa is here? When will I be old enough to stay at home alone? or to watch an adult movie? or get a job and make money? Or the dread, knowing there is a dental appointment or a colonoscopy only two days away, and it would most surely come too soon.
Time is also what we make of it, or what we let happen to it. Time is us. Every one of us is part of the time-line of this world. And we can't do anything about it except, perhaps, use it well and enjoy it.
(apologies for misspelling that eminent Frenchman's name)
My favorite mock-Latin phrase is "Tempus fidgit": time just can't sit still.
ReplyDeleteI see time relative to my life. When I was young, the idea of 4 years for a college degree seemed like a long time; that would use up something like a fifth of my entire life. Now that I am over twice as old as I was than, four years doesn't seem quite so long, even though it's the same span on the calendar. I am always one "me" old, so the years must somehow shrink to fit more of them into my lifetime.