ISSUES OF TIME - With Daylight Savings Time beginning, it's a good time to think about time--what it is and how we use it spend it, waste it. Being modern people we will not riot over our lost hour of sleep. It hasn't been stolen from us--and besides we will find this mislaid hour in the fall. We know that our ancestors of several centuries ago rioted all across Europe when the Julian Calendar was changed to the Gregorian and they "lost," ten days.
Many believed these days were stolen from their divinely allotted numbered days. It's reported that a politician, Ronus Paulus, objected to big centralized government attempting to regulate and therefore ruin time itself. He thought time was best decided locally. Okay, I made up the Ron Paul reference, but it's true that many particularly Protestant countries resisted the change coming out of Rome.
We understand that time doesn't live on either calendars or clocks. They only mark and measure time, not control it. Though we instinctively act sometimes like they do. In theatres, churches and synagogues, you can see people looking at their watches in the vain hope that they can speed time up and the movie, play, sermon or speech will come to an end. Having done this myself--particularly in airplanes when seated next to a talker, I can report that it doesn't work. In fact, the more I check, the slower time passes.
The relativity of time is clear to anyone over thirty and becomes more obvious with each accelerating year and now decade. When once 7th period algebra seemed to last an eternity, now time passes ever more rapidly--like our universe which, contrary to received wisdom of only a few years ago, isn't slowing in its expansion but actually speeding up. The falling sand in our aging hourglasses seem to erode the connecting tube so the hole gets larger and the sands pour far faster than before.
Most of us know (but don't understand) Einstein's remarkable theory that time isn't constant but relative and related to speed--and that somehow, as an object speeds up time slows and mass increases--till at the speed of light mass is infinite and time stops. Okay, I believe, but am seriously clueless on this.
I did have the Theory of Relativity explained to me when I was 8. My father owned a store in, and one of our stock boys went to Caltech. I asked him about the theory and told him that I heard only 5 people understood it. He said, "Nonsense, I'll explain it very simply, but you won't understand it for five years." He said, "If you sit on a hot stove for a second, it seems an eternity--despite the speed of your acceleration off the stove. If a pretty girl sits on your lap for an hour, its seems like a second." Of course he was right on both counts. I had no idea what he meant till I was 13 years old--when it came to me in a flash with my girlfriend perched on my lap.
The real and pragmatic question is not so much what it is--although that is interesting--it is what do we do with it? How shall we use it, spend it? Whatever other dimensions or worlds there may be, what we do today gives meaning to our moments under this sun.
Even were I to believe, as many religions teach, that an eternity awaits us, I should not allow any other dimension to diminish the precious nature of this moment. Similarly some physicists now posit, that there are an infinite number of worlds, worlds that capture every possibility--worlds where Newt Gingrich is a saint and Mother Teresa sells hair products on cable, worlds where the meek do inherit the earth and where I can carry a tune. Obviously too fantastical to be taken seriously. But note that both the scientific theory and the religious carry the same peril: If real life is not now to some religions and this is only a little quiz before the great final in the sky, and if there is an infinite number of "me" in different worlds, this world, this time, lose importance and today is diminished in the light of eternity and infinity.
I'm much more intellectually and spiritually comfortable with religions and philosophies that tell us to grab the moment. I love the lighthearted Christian bumper sticker: "Look busy, He's coming back!" Better still my secular creed: "Get busy the days are short, the darkness long and use this dimension, this time well."
We have this brief time, and the world is too big to accomplish all we could, but what is ethically unacceptable is the view that since we don't have all the time to do everything, then we don't have to do what we actually can. The worst argument that good people often make is this: It is already too late! It is too late to save the planet,. It's all over. We are lost. Good, thoughtful and scientific people give the same basic message as some religious fundamentalists (of all faiths) "The end is nigh!" The world will end tomorrow or December 22nd when the Mayan calendar runs out. Thus, if all is already lost and we don't have time, there's no reason to do the right thing today.
Well, the end is nigh. We live here so little time in geological or galactic time. Tomorrow is never promised or guaranteed. Now, however, is when the light shines. So, do we have time? I don't know. But we have to act as if we did, as if our lives made a difference, as if all of us doing small things contributed to a future beyond ourselves where our deeds continued to make a difference. The issue is not so much the days of our lives as the life, love and effort we put into our precious and numbered days.
(Jonathan Dobrer is an op-ed contributor to the Daily News and Friendly Fire and is a syndicated columnist. This column was posted first at Friendly Fire. More on Jonathan and his books at www.Dobrer.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 21
Pub. Mar. 13, 2012