The Insolence of Time

When I was a young boy I was playing football with a group of friends on a lush lawn covered with leaves one autumn afternoon.  I was experiencing such immense joy.  As the light began to fade, I wanted so badly to keep playing and to somehow have time suspended so that this incredibly fun game would not have to end.  But of course it did end . . .

Time is the merciless master of our lives.  Omar Khayam, the Persian poet, expresses the painful fact in a beautiful way:

“The moving finger writes, and having writ,

moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it”

Sometimes I want to cry out in frustration at the relentless nature of time.  Each moment experienced, then gone, never to be re-captured.  We are told to live life in the present or the moment, but the moment goes so quickly, often before we can even understand its import.  We are left with a memory, which then also proceeds to slowly fade away.

Of course sometimes the passage of time is of comfort – a trauma or a sadness that becomes less acute, less painful as the memory of it ebbs.  If time did not pass and memories fade, then the heartache and tragedies of this world would be unbearable.

When I am trying to rein in my eating and become more disciplined, I play a game and remind myself that the act of eating will only last a few moments and then the taste and the pleasure will only be a memory - hardly worth all the calories!  I am often successful in this little trick, but it has the nasty side effect of making me rather depressed.

Most human beings don’t focus on this transitory aspect of our lives other than to vaguely acknowledge it.  To dissect time too fervently is a philosopher’s habit and it can only lead to an unsettling malaise.

We speak in abstract terms about time as a fourth dimension, and of the space-time continuum.  Movies and books depict time travel and we are allowed to envision time as a kind of real-life video, with rewind, fast-forward and pause functions at our fingertips.  Would it be pleasurable to re-experience our lives whenever we wished to do so; to go back to wonderful moments and savor the emotions and the feelings exactly as they first occurred?  Not to change them, but simply to enjoy the experience again?  I don’t know.  The repeated re-living of an event might backfire, make it mundane.

Memories are interesting.  At first they are so vivid – almost as if one is experiencing the moment rather than simply observing it in one’s mind.  But as time goes on it becomes more difficult to summon that same feeling.  In the end, a memory becomes a story, and we are not entirely certain whether something actually happened or we have just been telling ourselves the story for so long that it seems real!  We can no longer ‘envision’ the event itself or see it in our mind’s eye.

The reason people identify with the ‘live in the moment’ adage is the sad fact that we spend so much of our lives either reminiscing or looking forward to something that will happen in the future.  But living in the moment is not easy!  The mind is a restless nomad.  If one’s mind is idle for even a few seconds, it will wander to the past or the future.  It takes great discipline to focus on the ‘moment’ unless one is busily invested in some activity that prevents one’s mind from wandering.  And if the mind is busy in that pursuit, is it really consciously living in the ‘moment’ – aware of its pleasurable state?  Tis a paradox!

The unyielding, forward-moving nature of time is particularly distressing for those of us whose lives are more than half spent and hurtling inexorably toward the great abyss!  And to make matters worse, time accelerates in a most unpleasant matter with age.  We want to scream out “SLOW DOWN!”, but we know it is futile.  So we try to derive what pleasure we can from fading memories and limited anticipations, as our bodies decay in a most undignified manner.  Well, I guess that is a bit melodramatic.

I will confess that overall my life has been quite joyful.  I am grateful beyond words for the majority of what I have experienced and hopeful for the years I have remaining.  But I will say that TIME is confusing and a bit frustrating, and, when I think deeply upon it, downright unsettling.