Time

I seem to have gained, it seems, some followers of the blog. So I’ll just come out and say, “Has it really been two weeks since I’ve written?”
“Well, yes it has,” if I can answer my own question. So here we are two weeks later than before. Spring is definitely in the air; March Madness (basketball) is well under way; I am already behind in my spring yard work; life seems to hurtle ever more quickly down the line of time.
Time.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m at the side of the time stream, looking on as a bystander. Other times, it feels like I’m right in the middle of it and it is carrying me downstream more quickly than I ever wanted to go. And there are a few times when the stream seems to be thick as molasses and I’m stuck in it and can’t get out.
This thing called time is an ever-changing chameleon, never predictable, always going somewhere. It is at once a friend and an enemy. It soothes and gives peace, and it grates and makes life miserable. It is cussed and praised. It is real, yet not tangible. We don’t know what it is or how it works, but we live with it, see the results of it, and keep track of it with clocks and watches.
Einstein proved that time is (or appears to be) a variable. He also showed that we should think of space-time…not space and time. Yet we calculate to the nth degree the span of a second.
We compensate for variations in the span of time in our satellite communications networks (GPS, for one). Yet we all age at the same rate and are all similarly affected by the passage of time.
We don’t know the future, try to forget the past, and don’t appreciate enough the present. We waste time, kill time, pass time, and mark time. We all have the same amount of time in a day. Yet some of us are much more productive than others of us and some of us seem to have an endless source of time to accomplish what others could only imagine.

It’s a great gift, this gift of time.