Time

You know what they say. Time is on my side. Time waits for no man. Time is money. Life is short, time is swift. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Time heals all wounds.

Einstein said in his theory of special relativity time was relative. He claimed that time and distance were not absolute. The movement of a clock was dependant upon the movement of the observer. Time could move slower for one observer and faster for another. He was fond of saying that “you spend an hour with a pretty girl and it feels like a minute; spend a minute with your hand on a hot stove and it feels like an hour.”

Though not a perfect analogy, this is appropriate. An hour in a meeting with your boss discussing your performance evaluation feels like it will never end, especially if your performance was subpar. An hour eating a good meal with a good friend who will be leaving and not returning at the end of the meal seems to melt away quickly.

Time, though measured in easy to digest increments, is not a rigid structure in your mind. Though you can reasonably count off a minute in your head, with decent accuracy, that does not mean that your mind distills each minute as the same increment of time. It is relative, in the sense that to you time marks itself off in a different manner than it may for your friends and colleagues. The same horrible hour you spend with your boss, the one that seems to drag on forever, may be gone in an instant for your younger brother and his new lover lying in bed for the first time. It may go even slower for the hospital patient waiting for the results of a biopsy. Though the hour is comprised of the same sixty minutes, the same 3600 seconds, the span of time may differ depending upon who is doing the measure. In the rigid sense, the same amount of time has passed. In the personal sense time has differed.

This sense of time becomes more and more evident as you grow older. Time seems to speed up with each passing year. The time between one Christmas to the next when you are eight seems like millennia. When you’re 25 and struggling to pay the bills, Christmas is suddenly upon you, beckoning and causing dread within you as you wonder how you’re going to float gifts when you’re already over your head. When you’re 85, one Christmas seems to bleed into another.

Time becomes a wholly different dimension as soon as you have children. While you have a sense of time growing up, it is relative only to yourself. You don’t notice your parents getting older, your brother getting taller or your dog slowing down. You look in the mirror every day and see that you look the same, to yourself, as you did yesterday. And the day before that and the day before that. At the end of the school year, you look at your school picture from September and don’t notice that your hair has grown markedly darker, your cheeks thinned out.

But to the parent, each day goes by in a minute. You look at your child in the morning and she is an infant. Helpless, hungry, in need of constant care. By lunchtime she is speaking fluently, walking, and grasping concepts that just a short time ago would have confounded her. At dinner, she is ten; smart, funny and just beginning her journey into selfish discovery. By 7 p.m. she is a teen, wrapped up in her own world. By bedtime she’s married with children of her own.

The child has moved through 24 years of her life in the span of what seems like a day to you. “It seems like only yesterday . . .” you are fond of saying. Just yesterday you were changing her diapers. Just yesterday she was starting kindergarten. Just yesterday she graduated from High School. Time melts away.

But for her, the time between school letting out and dinner is an endless desert. Once her homework is done, there is nothing to do. She’s played with her toys, has no interest in television. She sits and stares at you. You see her as a blur of light, moving from one thing to another. She sees you almost as a statue, moving with the speed of mud.

Do you remember the first time you looked at your mother and thought, “My God, she’s getting old.” It rarely happens. Because in your mind, you have unconsciously decided to make your mother an eternal 32. She will always be young, the way she was when she put the jelly on your toast for you because it tasted better when she did it. She is an unchanging constant in your mind.

You look at your children and you get a daily reminder of how quickly, how mercilessly time marches. Your chubby little baby is suddenly a mischievous little toddler, full of curiosity and questions. How did this happen?

You remember every single moment of her life. From birth until this very moment. Yet, the math doesn’t seem to work. Two years? How could it be? We just brought her home from the hospital yesterday! How can she be going off to an advanced placement test for third graders? Didn’t we just wean her from her bedtime bottle a few nights ago?

Time waits for no one. Not you, not me, not our kids. Time is all about how you use it. Sixty minutes may contain 3600 seconds. But a lifetime contains an unquantifiable measure of time.

How well do you use it?

Discuss