Editor's Blog May 14th 2012
Is it Time?
Life is short, I have heard this statement uttered a 100 times, no it isn’t. Life is the longest thing you will ever do.
But life span is surely a matter of perspective. Consider any number of creatures whose life span is measured in hours or days; do they think life is too short? The Sunland Baobab has been carbon dated to be 6000 years old, as trees go this is the upper scale but there are several examples where the average age is around a 1000 years, do trees think life is short, or do they not have any inkling about the passage of time?
We do a lot with our time as a species; we can save, waste, make, steal, lose, share, bend or gain time. Our obsession with time is almost at the top of our preoccupations, along with sex and money.
Time is also many things, time is money, time is of the essence and time can fly, you can have a long time or a short time, time can seem to stand still or speed up depending on what you are doing. Time can be good or bad. It is almost as we have personified the passage of time.
As far as I am aware, we are the only creatures to have invented boredom, that time between doing stuff and not being arsed to do stuff. This is where time seems to drag to a point where it almost comes to a halt. So would your life seem longer if you were perpetually bored?
Time, at least by humans, is measured by the one full rotation of our planet around the sun, which gives us a year and then it is sub divided into 365 days in a normal year. Days are then divided into hours and then minutes and seconds. Further sub divisions of time are unimportant to us, unless you are a triathlete or a weirdo.
If we are lucky we will average about 80 rotations around our big yellow star before time ends for us. This does seem like a small number, but in a regular year there are some 525,600 minutes, seems like more but it is exactly the same. I once had a conversation with an old Massai Tribesman, I asked him how old he was and after a bit of thought he said “5 rains”, I scratched my head and had to ask what that exactly meant and his reply was, “since I was born the plain I live on has flooded five times by big rain.” I wanted to ask more but he got up and said he had to see a bloke about a lion.
It’s not all doom and gloom, the reason that life seems short is that we seldom take the time to slow down to stop and take a good look around. There have been times in my life when an hour has seemed forever and other times when a month has gone and it has left me thinking where did it go.
Our preoccupations steal our time; we waste time on the mundane and the unnecessary, when our time should be spent wisely in good company doing the things we love. And whether you have a lot of time or a little, it’s what you do with it that is important.
Ed.
