Good grief! What happened to January? My New Year’s resolution — less of this, more of that — has not gained much traction. Time. One tick at a time. Slipping away. I’m doomed!
I bet it’s not just me. I mean this end-of-January scramble to put teeth into a New Year’s resolution. Seriously, what does January offer that the 11 other months of the year don’t? Shouldn’t there be in every conscious moment a chance to do better? Besides, January’s smack in the middle of flu season; it’s cold, damp, miserable and I’m not feeling that resolute. In all honesty, I’d rather sit home by the fire and watch paint dry, puzzle over something as mundane as Time, that nonspatial continuum that we never seem to have enough of until January rolls around, ambition spent, the coffers empty.
Albert Einstein says, “Time is relative,” but I say time is quirky business. English common law would have us believe that “Time is of the essence.” Willie Nelsen thinks it’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Time can be on our side; time can be against us. We suffer bad times, celebrate good times. If you’ve participated in a memorial service, you know that there’s a “time for every purpose under the sun.”
When I set my kitchen timer for four minutes, I’m creating a short-term, parallel time continuum which, if all goes well, results in two perfectly engineered, soft-boiled eggs and time well spent. Passing through time zones or switching to daylight saving time presents a heightened sense of juvenile mischief. Possibly, it’s all a big waste of time to think about, one circuitous endeavor that, in all eventuality, leads me back to the beginning — Einstein and his “relativity” thing.
Still, I find Time a most interesting commodity when viewed from alternate perspectives. Has it ever occurred to you that, between the covers of (for simplicity’s sake) a novel, every word in the book gives an accounting of itself in the same moment? Only when the book is taken down from the shelf and read, word by word, does the story suffer time.
Is it possible to grasp armloads of understanding in a single moment? I think, yes. When a traffic light changes to red, the consequences for my failing to stop don’t unfold a word at a time, they arrive all at once. Complex thoughts have been conveyed through imagery since the first footprint was left behind by some creeping thing. I recall a dramatic, panoramic image in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Comprehensive in scope, a football field long, it was a “Cyclorama in 360 degrees,” the Battle of Gettysburg. What would have taken hundreds, thousands, of words to communicate, I experienced in a glance, “Pickett’s Charge” in a nutshell.
“The time is always right to do what is right,” Martin Luther King Jr. tried to impress upon us. “Now is the time to realize the American dream. Now is the time to transform the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into a glowing daybreak of justice and freedom.” Timeless. King may have had an eye on the “prize,” but the other most certainly was on the “fierce immediacy of now.”
Who can argue against those words? Yet we do. Taking a wrecking ball — the Emancipation Proclamation, for instance — to deeply imbedded cultural issues is what precipitated division in Lincoln’s America. Some say “let things evolve.” Applying external forces to social inertia has its consequences: turning great ships on a dime breaks a lot of cups and saucers. Today, 161 years later, in many ways, we’re still dealing with Lincoln’s decision.
I do feel invested in humanity’s sense of reason and conscience, i.e., “The time is always right to do what’s right,” but a pragmatic sense of consequence haunts me. I suppose if our fundamental nature was to love one another, we could turn those big ships on a dime daily. Time might be relative as Einstein stated, but I say time is quirky business and full of the devil.
Donald Melville, Vietnam veteran, engineer, author, regularly contributes topics of interest and welcomes your comments at donaldemelville@gmail.com. Visit Don Melville essays on Facebook.
GUEST APPEARANCE: No time like the present
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03.02.2024
Good grief! What happened to January? My New Year’s resolution — less of this, more of that — has not gained much traction. Time. One tick at a time. Slipping away. I’m doomed!
I bet it’s not just me. I mean this end-of-January scramble to put teeth into a New Year’s resolution. Seriously, what does January offer that the 11 other months of the year don’t? Shouldn’t there be in every conscious moment a chance to do better? Besides, January’s smack in the middle of flu season; it’s cold, damp, miserable and I’m not feeling that resolute. In all honesty, I’d rather sit home by the fire and watch paint dry, puzzle over something as mundane as Time, that nonspatial continuum that we never seem to have enough of until January rolls around, ambition spent, the coffers empty.
Albert Einstein says, “Time is relative,” but I say time is quirky business. English common law would have us believe that “Time is of the essence.” Willie Nelsen thinks it’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Time can be on our side;........
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