APRIL 17, 2019 – A minute is always a minute, one equal to the next. But to my three-and-a half year-old granddaughter, a minute seems to last as long as 18 last for me. And if you’ve got low lung capacity, a minute is eternity if you’re holding your breath, especially while deep under water.
At the end of a wonderful vacation trip, full of new sights, fascinating encounters and great food and accommodations, time invariably accelerates toward the end of your travels.
As my dad pointed out when I was 32 and he was exactly twice my age, as a person grows older, each increment of time is a smaller percentage of the person’s total time, and thus psychologically, time seems to race as one ages. True, I suppose, you’re wheelchair bound in a care center, no longer able to hear or see, at which point perhaps time crawls to a stop. My dad lived to a fairly advanced age—still ambulatory with his sight and much of his hearing in place—but maybe because relatively little time was ahead, it actually reversed. In many a conversation, he wound up living very much in times past.
Ten minutes of local TV news while you’re waiting for Stephen Colbert’s Late Night Show seems interminable. On the other hand, 10 minutes between your place in the airport security line and the scheduled departure of your flight for O’Hare seems impossibly short.
All of which is before we get to Einstein’s theory of general relativity and what it tells us about time when we simply try to tell time.
One thing I’ve concluded firmly about time: it mustn’t be squandered. But of course you’re going to ask what “squander” means. Stay tuned for a discussion of that!
Before more time passes—squandered or otherwise—I must conclude this rumination. It is time for me to catch my bus (which is always on time) to work, where I account for my time on clients’ behalf as a measure of worth—to be billed, then collected so I can fill the rest of my time with stuff I need or want or both and to ensure that eventually I will have time in retirement, when I can think more about time—our most precious non-commodity commodity.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
