Monday, January 3, 2011

Time Won't Give Me Time

Why is it that I can get up at 5 am and still be late to work at 8 am? How come I can walk downstairs at 7:15 and not leave until 7:50? Where does the time go? I'm reading this article in the Scientific American about time. It's not giving me answers. I need to know, people, because time has given me problems my whole life.

My Mom and step-Dad used to say that I obviously believed that Star Trek was real. They said that because I would leave home at the same time that I was supposed to be someplace. They figured that I reckoned that I could just beam wherever it was I needed to be and be on time.

I go into a store and time stops. Really, it does! It doesn't start again until I come out of the store after strolling around touching, trying on, and paying. Then it's as if time has sped up out of control, and I'm late again. No, I know what you are saying and no, I'm not imagining it. Time really does stop. I forget all about time until I've left the merchandise induced trance that is shopping. And it doesn't matter how much I remind myself before I go in that I have a deadline or a time constraint (psh, as if I'd really recognize that), I still act like I have all the time in the world.

Why do some people have an innate sense of time and others don't? Now that I mention it, how did it get to be 11:30 pm now? I was just eating dinner with Steve a minute ago!

How can I wile away the hours conferring with the flowers and consulting with the rain, yet it takes for-ev-er for vacation to get here? Then when it does, why is it over in a blink, no matter what I do or how much I pack into it?

How can a life of four score years and 10 seem so short yet three years seems so long, unending and unendurable?

Do we as humans just long to be outside of time like God is and to see time spread out like a landscape in front of us like Scientific American says time is arranged with past, present and future mashed in together, losing their separate meaning? In eternity, will we have a sense of time or will we forget how old we've gotten? Will it matter? And if it doesn't matter then, why does it matter so much now?