My grandson turns three this month and while he understands that birthdays mean birthday parties and birthday parties mean birthday presents, he has no concept of what it means to have lived for three years. Even though he has been fascinated by clocks since he was barely a year old, time is irrelevant to him. It simply doesn’t exist.
It’s like that for all of us. Time is a relative concept in our lives and its value changes as we move through the years of our lives.
When we are very young, just as it is with my grandson, we have no awareness of time. When we grow a little older, it moves too slowly. We can’t wait to be 8 or 10 when we will be allowed to stay up an extra half hour or perhaps ride our bike all the way to the mall and back. We tend to wish time away in our hurry to get to be older because the age we are is not the age we want to be and time is limitless. Time has no end for us then.
By the time we have become teens, we have become immortal. Time is once again irrelevant but it is not because we are unaware of it but simply because we feel like we will live forever. Sixty or seventy years seems like infinity so there isn’t much reason to worry about time. Puberty becomes far more intrusive in our lives than time and we give ourselves over to it.
In our later teens, time has value only in so much as we never have enough time. We’re in a rush all the time. We have friends to meet, hair to do and make up to put on before the big date. We have to have yet another bloody assignment handed in by tomorrow morning and we haven’t even started the assigned reading. Nothing clarifies the value of time like having a final exam in the morning and the knowledge that you haven’t even begun to study the night before.
Time moves more slowly when we get out into the workforce and start building a life of our own.
We’re busy and time is important in and only because it managing time is how we organize our lives. We schedule appointments, have deadlines for projects and may be late for work because we missed the bus. In terms of our lives, however, time stands still until one day suddenly; we’re celebrating our fortieth birthday.
Where the hell did that come from?
Forty is a benchmark along time’s road. We all experience and we pretty much all react to it in similar way, more or less. Like turning twenty-one it’s a big deal but the difference is that when you turn twenty-one, it is with a sense of liberation and time stretches before you like the ocean. When you turn forty, you become aware that at best, half of the time you have been allotted may be gone.
Beyond the party with the sarcastic cards and the joke gifts, turning forty is a time of reflection for most of us. It is when we become aware of what we have accomplished so far and how much we have yet to get done. For some it is a non-event but for most it is mildly traumatic or at least the reawakening of our awareness that we are not immortal and that while time may be infinite, our time is not.
By the time we turn sixty we have mixed emotions about time. On the one hand we are becoming increasingly aware that we are staring our own mortality in the face but on the other, we are fairly happy not to have shaken hands with it yet. At sixty, the end of time becomes a real, if faint shadow on our lives.
Some try to reverse time with plastic surgery, diets, vitamins, exercise and various other practices but we know in our hearts that time is moving forward and it will continue with or without us. Some fear the end of their time. Death frightens them, others never give it much thought but we are all aware that the end is coming. It may be soon, it may not be for awhile but unlike when we were fifteen, we are aware that it is coming.
We are constantly reminded as people we knew start to die. When we were teenagers, it was a rare event for one of our friends to die and usually it was the result of an accident or some other tragedy. Now our friends are dying from illness and old age and we seem to go to more funerals than weddings.
I personally have always felt that whatever age I was at the moment was the perfect age to be. I feel that to this day even though my arthritis is painful at times and I’ve lost too many friends and family to their end of time. I wouldn’t trade this age to be young again for anything because time not only takes life, it gives it.
With age comes knowledge from experience. There is richness in a life that has lived for many years and their satisfaction in seeing your children grow up and take on successful lives. It brings grandchildren and less emotional turmoil than we experienced when we were young.
Scientists have complex theories about the true nature of time but for you and me, it is simply linear. It travels in a straight line and it travels in only one direction.
Time is infinite. Life is not and we look at time differently throughout our lives but in the end, however much time we were given, our time is measured by the life we lived. It isn’t death that should be our great fear, death is natural. The great fear should be reaching the end and realizing we squandered the time we were given and have little to show for our time on this earth.
What a sad waste of time that would be.
© 2012 Maggie's Bear
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