The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.   A. Einstein.

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.  D. Bowie

Time is the dominant factor in my life. I am always aware of time. Whatever I’m doing, even if pleasurable, I’m thinking about what’s coming next and what’s next after that and how long it’s going to take. I wake up in the middle of the night and know what time it is within about 5 to 10 minutes. It’s eerie and it’s a helluva way to live. I’ve always felt that my association with time in my life had the opposite impact of love. The poets say that love makes the highs higher and the lows less low. Well, you can guess what time does for me.

So, I guess because of the role that time plays in my life, I’ve spent more effort than most in contemplating time. I believe that time is essentially beyond our capacity to understand. We can write songs and sonnets about time. We can measure time. We can regret its passage. We can look back and look forward. However, I’m not at all certain that man has the ability to fully grasp the complete concept of time.

Man’s measurement of time is one of our greatest achievements. 60 seconds makes one minute and 60 of those minutes makes one hour and 24 of those hours makes exactly one day. Sunup to sunup can be divided so neatly. Brilliance. At some point, there must have been a meeting where that was decided. Think of being in that meeting. The “One Day Measurement Meeting”. I’ve never been in a scientific meeting like that. Efficient, exact, and correct.

I don’t think the “Year Long Measurement Meeting” had the same level of intelligence among their participants. “Ok, we’ve got 365 days in a year. How should we divide them up? Probably divide by 12, so we’d have 12- 30 day months and then 5 of those would need to have one extra day each for 5 months of 31 days and we’re done. Right? No? Ok, why should February only have 28 days? Because people will hate February and they’ll be happy when it’s over? You guys all really want that? Ok, so now we have 7 months of 31 days, 4 of 30 days, and February with just 28 days and that’s what we’ll saddle humanity with for the rest of existence.” Now, that meeting sounds familiar to me.

For all of man’s brilliance in dividing and measuring time, even down to milliseconds, it is difficult for us to grasp the idea of an entity that was existant before The Big Bang and will continue, inexorably and unchanged, after everything we know is gone. People tend to view time, as we do everything, in relation to themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it reduces time down to about 70 years, which is really disrespectful of time and places an inflated value on our existence in the “big picture”. But all of this is getting pretty existential and that’s not what I want to write about.

Because we are sentient beings and because we all die, time, whether focused on or ignored, is the most important factor in our lives. Time is unalterable. Its passage is relentless – in nature and in our lives. Time can be a dark and forbidding concept or time can be faced and, if not mastered, controlled.

Living a productive, active life is the best way to forge a healthy relationship with the passage of time. Family and friends, interesting events, new circumstances. That’s the formula.

There’s a toast that I make every Christmas dinner that, I think, sums up my philosophy of life and time: “May you remember the past with fondness, look forward to the future with hope, and live fully in the present”. I haven’t always achieved those 3 components, but they represent a worthy goal for a happy life.