Time After Time

I will never have time on my hands. Unlike many others, I would not be bored if I did not have a job to go to. Will Rogers said "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." I disagree. In my retirement I will not be wondering what to do with all my free time. I have so many unfinished projects and things that I would like to do that this will never be a problem. The problem is that time just keeps slipping away and I keep wondering where it went. In my youth I remember older people making the comment that the older you got the faster the time flew by. At the time I wondered why they would say such a thing when everyone knows that a minute is a minute, an hour is an hour and a day is a day no matter what your age. Now I understand! (Does that mean I've reached old age?) Yes, it is true... time flies!

Geoffrey Chaucer said, "Time and tide wait for none." This is a fact ... time definately does not stand still ...however, Mark Twain observed that this is "a pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide." The more advanced we become the more accurate this is. We just don't have time to wait for anything anymore. We hurry here and there packing as much "stuff" as we can into a twenty-four hour period. We have an obsession with cramming the backpack of our lives so full we lose track of the most important things. We search through life like a woman rummages through an overstuffed purse .... and we just can't find that one thing we need the most ... time. A comment attributed to Queen Elizabeth I in which she said, " All my possessions for a moment of time" turns out to be apocryphal, but it sounds good anyway! William Penn said it best when he commented, "Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst."

It seems there has long been a fascination with the subject of time. Benjamin Franklin's reflections include, "A stitch in time saves nine" and "Remember that time is money."

People have sung about time. Bob Dylan crooned, "The times they are a-changing" while Mick Jagger intoned, "Time is on my side, yes it is." Jim Croce had "Time In a Bottle" and the group, Chicago asked, "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" In 1942 Dooley Wilson sang the renowned "As Time Goes By" as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman gazed at each other over a little corner table at Rick's. Even in childhood we learned about time in the songs "Hickory Dickory Dock" and "Grandfather's Clock." When in a vehicle for an extended period of time many children will agree with Tennessee Williams that ''time is the longest distance between two places" (Are we there yet?!)

We can’t forget about the time machines that have sprung from the imaginations of writers and film makers. The forerunner of these probably dates back to 1895 when H. G. Wells penned "The Time Machine." And wouldn't we all like to have that DeLorean that transported Doc Brown and Marty McFly both to the past and the future! In one of my favorite Star Trek episodes a time portal called The Guardian of Forever carries some of the Enterprise crew back to the great depression era of the '30's. The episode entitled "The City on the Edge of Forever" reminds us, as do most fictional accounts relating to time travel, that we can't change the past or the future. As a youngster I was captivated by a Madeleine L'Engle novel entitled, "A Wrinkle In Time." This was a very controversial book of the early 1960's that dealt with travel into the fifth dimension, but I admired the authors imagination.

The Bible also has a lot to say about time but one of my favorite passages is Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 which says,
For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.


Mark Twain believed that 'regret for wasted time is more wasted time.' He's got a point, but I like T. S. Elliot's observation that 'time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time.' After pondering all these things ... my laundry needs to be done, my dishes are waiting in the sink and the bed is still unmade. They say there is no time like the present so ... it's time to go!