Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment.
~ Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins
Hmmm, are we condemned to be slaves to the clock?
It seems I am approaching the 10th anniversary of being on Twitter. So nice of Twitter to revamp their page design to mark the occasion. Never mind that it annoys me to no end to have to figure out what all the perplexing new icons mean.
Frankly, it seems much longer since I ventured into social media. It has grudgingly become a habitual component of my life as if it is something I have always done. And that perception has given me pause to stop and ponder how my experience of time has changed.
Strictly speaking, time is absolute – measured by ticks on the clock and divided into precise increments. 60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 24 hours in a day and so on.
However, our experience of time is very subjective. We reach for metaphor to wrap our minds around it. We say that time flies when we are having fun. It drags when we would rather be somewhere else than where we are. (A day at work comes to mind.) We bemoan how it gets away from us or catches up with us.
So which is true?
Is time absolute and never changing – ticking away with infuriating consistency?
Or is relative and subject each person’s state of mind on any given day?
An aside: In the Bible’s Old Testament, people lived to be 800 or even 900 years old. Dear God, what a thought! But is that the same measure of time as the current era when reaching 100 is beating all the odds? I can say for certainty that my body would not hold up that long.
I am inclined to believe, notwithstanding the judgemental clock glaring at me across the room, that we each have the ability and the freedom to mark time as we chose. We do not have to be slaves to the clock and its endless revolutions around the face.
A few years down the line when I retire and do not have to punch the clock (pun intended) five days a week, I may just ditch my wristwatch, take the battery out of my clocks and thumb my nose at time. Daylight savings time be damned!
When that day comes, I will always be on time no matter how slow or fast I move.
~ Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet
~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com.
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Tags: Christopher Morley · clock · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · timeNo Comments