The mystery of time

Spending time with my 88 year old mother gets me thinking about the passage of time. Since her short term memory isn’t so good, we often spend time talking about the past, a lot of which she does remember quite clearly.

It makes me wonder, how do we mark the passage of time?

And where does it go once it’s gone?

It seems universal, this experience of time speeding up. You wake up Monday morning, and before you know it, it’s Friday and you wonder, where did the week go?

Or as Dr Seuss puts it so eloquently, “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”

Then I wonder, well, what is time anyway? Is it the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks we schedule and program and cross off our calendars?  Or is it something else, something more elusive, more meaningful?

Then there is what physicist Sean Carroll calls the “arrow of time” – the fact that the past is different from the future. And why can we remember the past but not the future?  There are things that occur that you can’t reverse – like in his example – “You can turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.”

We all experience the  passing  of time– the changes it brings with it. My kitten is getting bigger. The roses are blooming. The leaves are coming back on the trees. The weather is changing. And on and on it goes, through infinity, apparently.

Here’s the one thing I can say with certainty. The more fully I inhabit the present moment, the more time I seem to have.

The more I am distracted by negative thoughts of the past (especially regrets, rehashing and the like), and fretful thoughts of the future (such as worrying) and not fully inhabiting this very moment, the faster time seems to go by. Because I was not present to it.

Funny how that works!

Maybe that’s why time seems to go slower when you are a kid, because, kids, as anyone who spends time with them knows, are very much in the present moment.

My granddaughters teach me that all the time.

So, this mystery called time, shall probably always remain a mystery…. But what we do with it, now that is something we can decide.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

What will you do with the time that is given to you?

 PS you might also enjoy Time for a Pause, You are not behind