The clock on
my desk sometimes seems to run my life.
I’m always checking to see that I am “on time” for this or that. Keeping people waiting is very uncomfortable
for me. Or I’m checking to see if I “have
time” to do one more thing before I need to move on to the next scheduled event. When I am not checking the clock, it seems
that I’m checking the calendar. Though
people often think that I have a calendar in my head, I have become
increasingly reliant upon paper calendars and electronic calendars to remind me
of how I’ve committed to spend my time. As I get older, it cannot be assumed
that an appointment is sufficiently encoded on that calendar in my head. And, of course, I wouldn’t want to miss a
thing. Where did all of this preoccupation with time come from? How did time become so important?
Time can be loosely defined as a space between
events. Early measures of time were quite
simple and functional. A day, the space
between two nights, and a month, the space between new moons, were adequate
measures in early “times”. Even now, I love it when I hear a parent tell their
child “just two more sleeps” before some anticipated event. This refreshingly simple measure is adequate
for the really important things in life.
Similarly the measurement of one’s age as the number of harvests he/she
has lived through seems adequate without reference to the precise month date
and year when we arrive or pass from this world. Bedtime was once the time when the day no
longer provided adequate light. What
simplicity.
In my own life I
intend to seek out more unscheduled “times”. Let me pencil that in.
