…And Where You Are Within It
Right now, you live as life is supposed to be lived: with an unintended, carefree recklessness. You don’t have a sense of time, really, other than day and night, and all the points in between are shining moments strung together with no design in particular.
You don’t actually know what a moment is. That’s the ironic beauty of this discussion. Because your ability to have complex, abstract thought is not yet fully developed, the time to teach you about time is not now. For now, continue to live moment to moment.
Right now, when we say we’re going somewhere, and we get delayed for some reason, you ask, “How can we go?” You’re asking, “What’s taking so long? Why the hold up?” This is your first understanding of time.
In another year or so, you’ll start to ask: why does it take so long for my birthday to come? Why isn’t it Christmas yet? On long drives, you’ll soon be asking, “Are we there yet?” As you start to settle into school, you’ll begin to notice the clock. That at specific intervals, you get to go out and play, eat, and come home.
It won’t be until you’re much older when you know how long an hour really is, or that a year is twelve months, or that your birthday is a marker of how many times you’ve been around the sun. One day you’ll geek out about the synchronicity of our planet’s axis and solar orbit, how it all seems perfectly organized, down to the minute. You’ll appreciate watches in ways you never knew.
And it won’t be until you’re much older that you’ll realize all the organized beauty about the years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are just labels humankind has created to feel better about this thing we can’t fully comprehend. I don’t recommend you abandon the structure of timekeeping itself once you figure this out—the established table is an important surrogate marker—but I do suggest you take note of where youare within the fabric of time. Try to become fully invested in the value of time, that it is something you can earn, save, spend, or squander. I dislike calling it money, yet it is a currency.
Time, you’ll learn much later, is something you’ll want on your side. And it’s not so much about having more of the currency, but making the most of what you have. It’s about feeling good about what you’ve earned, and savoring how and what you’re spending it on, and whom you’re spending it with. Sure, you’re going to waste plenty of it, and that’s okay, but please, please, please, don’t waste it all. Time is not something your father can dispense from his wallet, nor is it anything you can get from plastic card.
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Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
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