It’s About Time

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

This is the time of year when I usually write a column or two about the passing of time, about how fast the year has gone, and about what we may have in store in the next year. It may touch on things recently experienced and be a bit about how quickly we get old… things like that.

This year I thought I’d do something a little different. It is true that the year has gone by quickly, as usual, for me, seeing that we are already halfway through December. Twenty twenty-five will be here seemingly any minute, for sure.

The ‘different’ thing for me this year is that I recently experienced something in my life that sort of grabbed me by the collar, shook me around a bit, and made me re-think exactly what the times of our lives are, and even more, what time itself is. If you don’t mind, and at the risk of you thinking me even more strange than you might already, I'd like to share some of that with you.

I love books, and believe it or not, stating that now should make sense to you in a few minutes. It’s not that I’m a voracious reader, as is my wife. In fact, I probably write a lot more than I read. Writing sort of invigorates my mind; reading a lot seems to put me to sleep. Go figure.

The books I do love best are the really old ones. The Bible is the one that is understood as my favorite, but also other old and brittle, well-worn tomes full of even more worn pages are wonderful too. Those books bring the past, the ‘then-present’ thoughts of long-ago people to our own present, to the ‘now’ of our own existence. In this way I think of old books as time capsules. Those people who wrote them share their ideas with us; their ‘present’ moments are presented to us in our own present moment, if you see what I mean. The author had the same thoughts at the moment of writing as I do at the moment of reading, regardless of the number of years or even centuries between my time and his or hers. (That makes my brain hurt, just a little.)

I’d like to do a short object lesson regarding ‘time’ and maybe the fact that we really don’t need to worry about things in the past or the future. To do an object lesson you need an object. Our object will be a book. It doesn’t need to be an old book, just a book. So, go get a book. I’ll wait.

Now if you could just hold the book in your hands and let it open, maybe somewhere in the middle, although about eleven twelfths of the way toward the back of the book would be perfect. It is December, which will be in the back, but it’s just an object lesson, after all. Find a page in the book and hold that page between your thumb and forefinger. That’s right. Just like that. Now imagine that the pages to the left of your fingers are the pages you have already read, or the days of this year that you have already lived. The days, the pages to the right of your hand, although just in your mind, would be blank, as those have not been experienced yet. That part of the book has not even been written yet; you have not ‘lived’ those days yet.

If you think about it, maybe not completely clearly, but somewhat objectively, the page in your fingers is all we really have. We live ‘on the edge’ of that page, a fleeting moment at a time. The pages of life, of the year, of the months and weeks and days of it, are all either in the past or the future. Sure, you can re-read those old words of the past, written to the left of where your page is, but you are reading them in the precise ‘now’ of your time. You can attempt to write on the pages of the future, but only in vagaries and hopes of what will happen during them.

To me, all that means, if it means anything at all, that we don’t need to worry about the past, as it no longer even exists other than as old words. We don’t need to relive it all the time. It has been said that “Forgiveness is giving up on having a better past.” Interesting.

And looking at the blank pages of the future may help us sort out and manage tomorrow’s time a bit, but that also does not YET exist. All we can do is try to pin those pages down with what we think, or wish will happen.

So, my good friend, time as we know it may not exist at all, other than as an invention to keep things mentally ordered.  We have no promise of tomorrow but exist on that thin edge of the page called ‘now.’  As the next year approaches, let’s remember to live in the present, where we belong.