A Bit Cuckoo

 

By G. E. Shuman

As I sit here to write this column, on the wall just on the other side of the room is my cuckoo-clock. It is an old one and is getting older (as am I) with every tick and every hour its little bird announces.

Cuckoo-clocks are sort of novelty clocks. I must pull those chains to wind the clock and the cuckoo twice a day, EVERY day. If I forget to do so, it will stop before the next twelve hours are over. So, with my memory being what it is lately, the clock stops quite often and must be reset and then wound again. The next time I will keep it going, I always think. Sure, I will.

The thing is that the clock is just a measuring device of sorts. The ticks and cuckoos measure the passing of time, but don’t keep time going. The clock often stops due to my inattention. Time does not.

But then, I now remember, I have always wondered if time, the thing the old clock is measuring, is really a ‘thing’ at all. If not, the old cuckoo behind the little door on the clock has wasted his ‘time.’ It is, of course, very handy to have something to tell us if we’re going to be early or late for work, I suppose, (or is it, really?) Our ancestors must have thought so, or they wouldn’t have put clocks in church steeples; or maybe they were only tired of people being late for church all the ‘time.’

The reason I’m not sure about clocks and the time they measure is that the only sure thing about time’s existence is existence itself. I exist right now. I don’t exist yesterday, at least not anymore, and I can’t exist tomorrow, yet, because tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. Nothing about it is real… at least it isn’t right now. Right?

In Philippians 3:13 the apostle Paul tells us to forget those things which are behind. For him that was a real mouthful. Remember, he was the guy who had held the coats of the crowd so they could stone the Christians. In Matthew 6:34 Jesus himself admonishes us to “take therefore no thought of tomorrow.” Why worry about something that doesn’t exist yet? 

So, the past is just a memory which shouldn’t be worried about, and the future isn’t even that yet. We live in the ‘right now.’ And that ‘right now’ is all we have. My cuckoo clock does tick off the seconds, (when I remember to wind it,) but yesterday’s ticks and tocks will never be heard again; tomorrow’s have not yet happened, and we have no promise that they ever will.

Look at it this way: A yard stick measures the length, depth, and breadth of an object; a clock only the length of the existence of that object. Duration is the fourth dimension, to be sure, but if the first three dimensions of a thing didn’t exist, there would be no need for it. I believe that when God created the first ‘thing,’ He began time and started the possibility of the necessity of a clock. Remember, nothing exists, right now, in the past or in the future. We would be wise to live in the ‘right now, of our own existence; for that is all we really have. Tick-tock.  Okay, I’ll admit that is a bit cuckoo.