Time is so much more than we realize.
If I asked you what time it is, you’d probably look at your watch, or more likely, your phone, and tell me a few numbers. However, if I removed one tiny, seemingly insignificant word, the entirety of the question would change to one of existential thought provoking propositions. With the word “it” removed, we’re simply left with “what time is?”. In other words, WHAT IS TIME?”
Interestingly enough, I’ve never held it, seen it, or heard it, yet it is always there with me wherever I go. It would seem like the word time was a kind of name created by man in an attempt to describe the following.
Time is Free, but it’s priceless.
You can’t own it, but you can use it.
You can’t keep it, but you can spend it.
Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.
My answer to the question has definitely changed over the years. If I was asked as a young boy what time is, I probably would have stared back at you with a jovial smile, shrugged my shoulders, and said something back like, “I don’t know ….you wanna go play?” For back then time wasn’t relevant. A short period later I’d be in my teens and if asked again, I most likely would have said “it’s how much crazy ridiculous fun I could have in between going to and coming home from school.” Slightly more relevant but again not taken that seriously. Fast forward just a few years into my mid twenties and then my answer would somehow try to tie together ‘money accumulation with the hours of the working day’. But as I sit now on the border between 36 and 37 years young, I recently found myself asking that very question to the guy in the mirror. Truthfully it hasn’t been until the last couple of years that I’ve come to grasp what time really is.
Brace yourself, because here comes the epiphany!! Time = Life + Choice.
In other words, time at its very core is our perspective on our biological life and how we choose to live it. In the 1st half of the equation life is the great equalizer of which we have very limited control. And in the 2nd half, what we choose to think, believe, say and do add up to how we spend our existence. Unless you’re a mad scientist capable of building a time machine, then you, me and everyone else only gets one go around in the equation…..and that trip happens pretty damn fast. Not to be mistaken for happening in ‘the blink of an eye’ however.
Now the internet is chalked full of quotes about how life happens in ‘the blink of an eye’. Some funny, some sad, and some even with pictures of people taping their eyes shut so that the blink never ends. Ha! If they only could see the irony in that, with all they’d miss seeing. Yet, I disagree. That all to commonly heard statement puts the emphasis on the wrong part of the equation. Life doesn’t happen in the ‘blink of an eye’, it’s our choices that do. You see life was given to us at birth, and will stay with us until death, and our choices are what fills in the middle. Some are conscious, some are unconscious, and some occur by never occurring at all (i.e.: indecision is still a form of decision making, albeit not a good one). A great quote by Alice Bloch that I’ve always been fond of sums it up perfectly. “We say we waste time, but that’s impossible. We waste ourselves.” In essence, we waste not our time, but our choices.
So in the end, that guy in the mirror reminded me that after 36 years of making choices, some smart and some not so smart, I would if given the chance, turn down that ride in the Mad Scientists time machine, because some revelations need many years of living through them in order to truly be comprehended. I wouldn’t want to tell my younger self anything that would alter the time needed to understand what I now know.
All that being said, I feel quite optimistic about the time ahead for my next 3rd of a century. Where I’ll be, I don’t know for sure, but as I shrug my shoulders and smile jovially while writing this, I do know that I’m excited to have a greater understanding of time now and be making better choices along the way.
And by the way, the next time someone asks you, “What time is it?” have a some fun with your answer. “It’s 2:00, time to make better choices.” After all there’s always time for a little fun!
Cheers and here’s blinking at you my friends.
Matt