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Michael's Metaphors of Life Journal

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Time Enough, But None to Spare

September 2nd, 2012 by Michael Dyet

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” ~ Saint Augustine, North African Bishop, Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church

Hmmm, how did we become so time-obsessed? Is there not a better way to mark the passage of our mortal lives?

Time seems to be our mortal enemy in the modern world. There is seemingly never enough of it. Never matter how many time-saving devices we create, it slips through our hands and leaves us wondering how it got away from us.

We race time to get where we’re going, to meet a deadline or to be first across the finish line. We divide our lives into definable chunks of it – seconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years – and then lament how it passes too quickly. Perhaps it wouldn’t pass so quickly if we were not so obsessed with measuring it.

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” ~ William Faulkner, American writer and Nobel Prize laureate

How many clocks do you have in your house? I live in a one bedroom apartment and I have four including the one on the stove and the watch on my wrist. How much time do I waste each day looking at the clock to see what time it is?

I absolutely hate being late to anything. It messes with my state of mind. So I’ve become one of those annoying people who are chronically early.

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” ~ William Penn, Real Estate Entrepreneur and Philosopher

What I’m getting at here is that we have become slaves of time – or, more accurately, slaves of the clock. The truth of the matter is this: time is a human fabrication and a human preoccupation.

The other living creatures on this planet don’t scurry around self-possessed with time. They live by the natural rhythms and cycles of life. Sunrise and sunset, the progression of the seasons, the phases of the moon and the sequence of the tides. They acquiesce to the passage of time rather than constantly battling against it.

“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.” ~ Harvey MacKay, Motivational Author and Speaker

I’ve come to realize that we’ve made time a commodity. We put an artificial value on it in various ways – we’re paid by the hour, we travel at miles per hour and we even purchase units of it for our cell phones and other supposedly time-saving devices.

Perhaps we would be better off if we conceived of time as merely a metaphor for the graceful progression of our existence from the miracle of birth to the certainty of death. There is nothing to be gained from rushing.

I’ll let American author and essayist Charles W. Chesnutt have the last word on the subject: “There is time enough, but none to spare.”

~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.comor the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.

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