Time Musings

Can you hold time in your hand? Place it on your dresser? Put it in your wallet?

Can something impalpable exist?

And yet we measure by it—past, present, future.

While physicists debate its existence, intuitively we believe in it.

Like we do God.

We age by it. We are not what we once were.

Gardeners know its passage, from seed to birth, ripening to harvest.

Or as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam renders it, “One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.”

Perhaps we’d do better to conceive time as flow, or infinity’s rhythm, with neither beginning nor ending, our lives but a wink amid a stellar darkness of unending boundary, a universe among universes, yielding mystery and wonder to finite eyes.

Always Was, Is, and Shall Be.

If we truly believe in time, it behooves us to use it wisely, alter our history, relish awareness, and live in the present.

Or as Mark Twain, one of America’s genuine truth-sayers, put it, “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

–rj