Time is an odd thing and yet we’re all consumed by it. Jim Croce wanted to put it into a bottle. H.G. Wells wanted to travel through it with the machine he created. Tony and Doug entered into it through a Tunnel on TV in the 1960s. And for the vast majority of us, it just seems to slip away.
Since the age when we were first able to stand upright, we’ve wondered about time and tried become its masters. We started with sticks in the ground, then moved up to the sundial. We convinced ourselves that thousand dollar watches created by the Swiss would somehow measure time more accurately than a $20 Timex. We even created an atomic clock to give us the “real time”, even though the time lady on the phone used to do just fine back in the day.
I, however, am not a slave to time. I know that our concept of time is entirely random, based on the fact that our earth does a little pirouette on its axis once every 24 hours. Big deal.
But as we know, someone much wiser than us came along long ago and figured out that the easiest way to divide up a day was in 24 slices. Not 25 mind you, not 23, not 13. He kept dividing it all up into neat little increments, until we had a second.
And so started our obsession with time. “Just a minute.” “Got a second?” “Maybe next week.” “We’re out of time.” “Time to move on.” Our own language has memorialized it to the point of being virtually meaningless. Which it is, of course.
A day on earth is 24 hours, sure. But on Saturn, a day is only 10 1/2 earth hours. Why, you’d barely have a cup of coffee at work and it would time to go home for the day. On Neptune a day is 16 hours.
Venus really screws up the concept of a day. Their “day” is 243 earth days long, but their year is shorter, 225 days. So when you say “I’ll do it tomorrow” on Venus you’re really saying, “next year.”
The pope threw a wrench into the concept of time, too. As you know, the timing of days and years was a tricky thing back in the day. The calendars of the time would get so far off Christmas would end up being on a spring day. So the pope, in his eminence and wisdom, simply removed a couple of days in 1582. You went to bed on Oct. 5 and when you woke up the next morning, it was Oct. 15. It happened again in 1752 when 11 days in February were removed. George Washington’s Feb. 11 birthday became Feb. 22 in a blink. Of course, we couldn’t leave his birthday alone either, but only because we wanted a three-day holiday in February. But I digress.
So, where am I going with this? Give me some time and I’ll tell you.
We live on a hair’s breadth of sanity in our country. We rage in traffic because we’re running behind, we apologize for being a few minutes late, we acknowledge fetes of sporting achievements in seconds and even milliseconds. We hold onto time way too tightly. Especially since it’s all based on a random act of the universe – how long it takes the earth to whip around once.
I stopped wearing a watch in 1990, I think. I don’t know. I didn’t look at the calendar when I took it off for the final time. I had been going to the Caribbean regularly prior to that. There’s that old joke down there that islanders buy an expensive watch just so they can see how late they will be.
Island time really appealed to me. People in the islands live on a different time standard than we do. And they aren’t all stressed out that they are a couple minutes late, or even a couple hours late.
Some would think that’s rude in our country. I would assume they are the slaves to the standards of time. It can be a bit of a drug after all. Punctuality is an admired trait in our society. As you know, the early bird catches the worm. But it’s not the concept of time is hardly finite, even from one part of the country to another.
Case in point. In Florida, when someone has a party at 8 p.m. you’ll pull up to the house promptly at 8 and find that everyone is already there. If you show up at 8 to a party in Seattle, the host will still be in the shower and look aghast at the rude guest who showed up early. If you want to be on time to a party in Seattle, you’d better not arrive before 8:30.
Now, I will confess, I still adhered to the randomness of time for a time, largely because I liked to watch certain TV shows and TV was pretty regimented. If I wasn’t in front of it promptly at 9 p.m. I’d miss the start of a favorite show. But now I have a DVR. I can watch a show anytime I want to. Best of all, I can start watching it at 9:12 and miss all the commercials, saving me 20 minutes an hour.
But I can’t do anything with those extra minutes. They pass with alarming regularity. Even if I pick up a few in the daytime, I lose a lot of them in my sleep. I’ll wake up and see on the alarm clock that it’s 3:28 a.m. I will shut my eyes for just a moment or two, look again, and it’s 5:10. What the F—? Where did all the time go?
I know that time is a bunch of made up crap and science has proven it.
They’ve actually done a test to see that time really can speed up or slow down. If you’ve ever been in an accident then you know this is already true. Time slows down and you can remember every crazy second of it.
The test was simple. They created a display with a series of random numbers that couldn’t be understood by the test subject. They blinked by too fast. Then they dropped him unexpectedly from a height into a net. As he fell, he could was told to read the numbers. He did. He could see them as he fell, because for him, time slowed down.
People in the Caribbean already know that, of course. I’m working on learning it. When the Millenium came along I didn’t party like it was 1999. It didn’t matter if the real Millenium came along in 2000 or 2001. The pope and Gregorian calendars had already knocked 21 days off. So who knows when it was really 2000 years from the start of A.D. time? And really, who cares?
We have only one time point that we can measure and control. It wasn’t a scientist who discovered it either. It was George Carlin. According to him, we only have a “moment”. The moment is coming, it’s here, damn, the moment is gone forever.
For me, I will make the moments count. For they are the only thing I can truly measure and remember.
Now, if they only had a watch for that…
Well, time’s up. Time to go here on the old Treasure Coast,
— Robb