‘A long time ago’, an hour, a century, a millennium; leave it to me to fuss over a few ticks of the clock. Still, the best stopwatch will die of corrosion and decay before the earth clock reverses its magnetic field again. That would be a single tick/tock on the earth clock. Its pendulum oscillates once every couple-hundred thousand years. You know, there was no such thing as time until humans invented it. Our ancestors needed a practical way to put things in chronological order, a way to correlate what had passed and anticipate when/what was yet to be. But you knew that. I’m just regurgitating, long time ago stuff that tasted good the first time.
I like numbers almost as much as I like words but the numbers can make me crazy. When you start adding digits on either side of the decimal point it doesn’t take long, as in a long time, for the number to stretch beyond one’s ability to imagine. The gap between 1.0 and 10.0 is only one zero, equal to the years between the third grade and army boot camp. That was easy. Adding zeros; add another and 100.0 years is longer than most of us get to live. Another zero back in time and you meet William the Conqueror and the Norman conquest of England: the Battle of Hastings. That’s a (1) with three zeros ahead of the decimal. This compounding by tens goes off the chart in short order. Keep adding zeros. With six that’s a million, add three more zeros and it’s a billion. It’s wild, from the number one to a billion in just 9 zeros. Enough, enough!
Time: long story short - time, long time or short time, it is a tool. It makes life easier than it would be otherwise. Eckhart Tolle, (spiritual guru) makes a convincing case for ‘Now’ rather than time. He reasons that, nothing ever happened in the past and nothing will ever happen in the future. Everything that ever has or ever will happen, it does so in the moment, in the fleeting present. Imagine a tiny ant stuck on the headlight of a speeding train that will never slow down, never stop. At any given point, you could plot its coordinates but by the time the numbers come up, in the next split second, those coordinates would change. Where you were 1.0 second ago is history, it was real then but it isn’t real anymore, only in your memory. You can reflect on the story but the action is fixed, you can’t alter it, you have moved on in the moment. For the sake of precision, the time is ‘Now’. The time is always ‘Now’ Every blink of the eye, you change coordinates, something happens, you breathe in or breathe out and it is part of your story. But like the ant, when we arrive at the next breath, the future has advanced correspondingly and the time is still ‘Now’. We can not escape the ‘Now.’
Time is the tool we need to keep things in order, to organize, to anticipate and to recall. The reason we put so much import on past or future is, I suppose, because the perception of moving out of the past, into the future feels so real; sort of a common sense validation. I don’t put much stock in common sense. Albert Einstein would seem more reliable than common sense. He said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices one accumulates in their youth.” Before I discovered the Einstein quote a very good, maybe a great child psychologist (we were struggling with a troubled teenager) he told me that common sense was neither common nor made sense. Just sayin’, that was a long time ago. Just looked out the window: grass needs mowing and Covid-19 numbers are still going up. But that is another story.
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