taking time

How often do you find yourselves saying “If only I had the time” or “ I don’t have time to do that “? Have you ever given a thought to why we have such a measurement?

Rhythm is essentially human. It is both convenient as well as comfortable. It is a measure of things and it standardises things. An hour in Africa is the same as an hour in America, not like language or currency. We don’t need translation or conversion.

Our 12 month calendar is 5000 years old but it was the Egyptians who gave us the 24 hour day, the Babylonians months of 28 days. The Chinese first introduced clocks but Italians added automation and the Germans clockwork. We didn’t even have seconds until 400 years ago!

In 1967 a second was officially defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom!".

So time is actually a measurement of movement. It is fluid. That possibly explains why it seems to be always passing by quickly.

We cannot bank it, we cannot use it more than once, we cannot go back into it and although we can look forward to it, we do our living in it today… not yesterday or tomorrow.

It is interesting to note the recent disappearance of the LCD watch… the reasons given through research explain it simply. The watch screams at you in seconds and even nano seconds. It has no past or future. What time is it you ask…… about 7.17 comes the answer.

The analogue watch is much more comforting. It has a sweep hand and it knows nothing of the split second. It’s almost 20 past would have been the answer to the former question. You can see where the minute hand came from and see how long you have left to complete your task.
It has been said “History repeats itself, it has to no one listens the first time”. In Ireland we can too easily affirm the accuracy of that truth. We can become victims of times past. We have become entrenched in our present situations or afraid of the uncertain future. Time is received in the LCD mode. We live for now with little thought for the future. Why not stop allowing time to rule us and allow us to use time for prodigal acts of generosity.