I Can't Wait!

As I’m sitting here wondering what I will write (the well seems dry today), I can hear the every-second ticking of the battery-powered clock on the wall right behind me.  “Each second that goes by,” I say to myself, “Is a second I can never recapture or use again.  How did I use the seconds that have gone away just in the last minute or so?  And just what is a second, anyway?”

Now, that’s rather heady stuff for someone who is weaning himself off of caffeine this week and hasn’t a thing to write in a blog.  The notion that I can at once be empty of thought for a blog I’ve done about every week since 2005, but at the same time ponder the passage of time and the space-time relationship is actually rather stunning, in my mind.  And the fact that the second has been defined as, “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom (at 0°K, or absolute zero)” didn’t escape my notice either (although I haven’t the foggiest notion what that means, how they measure it, or why it’s that important).

So, in the interest of relating the space-time relationship to blog-writing in some fashion, I’ve decided to write about time, the passage of time, and how that relates to the universe, at least the universe I’m in (which is much, much smaller than the OTHER universe).

We waste a lot of time, it seems.  We stare at the computer screen for hours on end.  We watch insane, or just plain stupid TV shows all evening.  We daydream.  We procrastinate.  And we dawdle.  Oh my, how we dawdle.

We many times wish we were anywhere except where we are, and that we were doing anything except what we are currently doing.  We put weird things out on the Internet via Facebook, Twitter, or some other medium (blogging, perhaps) that no one understands and fewer care about.  And we wait.  We wait at traffic lights.  We wait at the doctor’s office.  We wait at the checkout line at WalMart or Dillons.  We wait for someone to get out of the bathroom so we can use it.  We wait at the ATM drive-up.

Then, as if to ameliorate the waiting, we hurry to the next checkout line, or the next traffic light, or the next appointment…there so we can wait yet again.  I have to wonder if Anyone is watching “out there” and is doing some serious soul-searching regarding why He made us and the rest of the creation.  And if we could see ourselves as we really are, we probably would shake our heads, do the tsk tsk thing, and write ourselves off as incorrigible.

So, having been duly prompted by the ticking of the clock behind me, I’ve managed yet again to create words that have some kind of meaning and purpose, although in re-reading them I’m not sure of that.  Hopefully you will tune in next week when I hope to have something of some importance to say.  That will be in 604,800 ticks of the clock, and 5,559,703,694,496,000 oscillations of the cesium atom at rest.  I can’t wait!