'Scuse me. What time is it?

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A sixtieth wedding anniversary is occasion for talk of time. “Seems like yesterday” and “Where have the years gone” and “My you look young in your wedding photos” all point to an awakened consciousness about how time past, present and yet-to-
come is experienced. Time drags in the dentist’s chair, seems to speed by while clinging to just a little more of it, please Lord.

               I read some websites on Physics research, but I can’t claim to know how time and space are related and can be mathematically shown to be the same thing. It belongs in the same bin with the theory that space is curved, that time is relative, and that time slows or accelerates slightly depending on gravity. I can take the scientists’ words on these, but don’t ask me to explain what they mean.

               What I think I get is that accurate time measurement has become more and more important to economies, political systems, and daily commerce. Our measurement of time, however, is completely earth-bound: the revolutions and rotations of our planet give us the concept of day following night following day, and dividing those entities up into hours, minutes and seconds is completely arbitrary. Mars has day and night like earth, but from one noon to the next takes 41 earth-minutes more than ours. It has four seasons, but they’re longer than ours and since Mars tilts on an axis different from earth, they’re not equitable with earth seasons.

               When a physicist says something like, “There’s actually no such thing as time in the universe-sense,” we might well scoff. But the problem may simply be that we’re not talking about the same time. “At what time is your sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration starting?” is not anchored in some past-present-future nebula: if you arrive at 10:00 post meridian time and it was scheduled for 07:00 post meridian time (p.m.) the celebration will no longer be going on; you will have missed it. Earth time and earth time-keeping are absolutely crucial in a post modern world of high populations whose interactions must be coordinated to succeed.

               I wonder what has to change in astronauts and cosmonauts operating the International Space Station in order to adjust to 15 sunrises in one earth-day. Surely, they don’t go to bed 15 times in 24 earth-hours. They must return to earth with an altered concept of time’s meaning, surely.

               I am living my 81st year. I’ve experienced 29,415 earth-sunrises. Age means something, but what means more is the degree to which entropy, disease or accident have reclaimed the mineral/water molecules that allowed me to exist as a living being.

Much of our time-consciousness derives from our life spans, the average over the centuries (century: a period of 36,525 sunrises) having increased steadily from prehistoric 10,950 earth-sunrises, to the Biblical three-score and ten or 25,550, to the current 30,112.5.

The concept of never-ending time (eternity) adopted from the Greeks sometime between the  Old and New Testaments is never defined in Physics nor in Judeo-Christian religion. “An eternity that cannot end can’t have had a beginning either,” my friend insisted. And so it joins speculation about the edge of space as a mindboggling puzzlement. Helpful for me has been the definition of eternity that says, “a state to which time has no application ….” In other words, to think or speak of eternity as being X earth-years long would be similar to saying that “I love you 1,250 gallons.” Likewise, trying to estimate the distance to the edge of space in feet, miles or light-years is to deal with the concept using measurements that don’t apply.

The distance to the end of space is a state that is immeasurable; eternity, likewise, is a state that defies measurement.

A cruise line ad on PBS tells us that time is the only scarce commodity, and we must therefor use it wisely … by exploring the world on one of its cruise ships, of course. Now in my 81st year, I do think in earth-measurements, naturally, and I decided to use 2 ½ hours to type and post these thoughts. Was that a wise use of a dwindling time? My desk is piled with papers that cry out for sorting, filing, whatever. Would cleaning up be a wiser expenditure of time?

I’m thinking in earth-time-measurements when I evaluate what to do with my time. Perhaps we’re missing an important state that has nothing to do with time and distance, space or eternity and therefor doesn’t respond to measurement. Perhaps it’s what Jesus called “The Holy Spirit,” what T.S. Eliot called “Spiritus Mundi,” and maybe a humanist would describe as intuition or insight. Maybe it’s unlike the souffle we’ve baked, more like the cherry that falls into your lap while resting in the shade of the tree.

“Inch worm, inch worm. Measuring the marigolds. Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.”[i]       

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