Time –– It’s All Relative

By L. Stewart Marsden

 

I wrote a poem years ago entitled “All the Clocks Are Broken.” In its simplistic rhyme and meter, it playfully touches on time and how fickle it is. For example, in anticipation of a great event, like a birthday or Christmas, the clock slows down to a crawl, making your toenails itch.

Or, the opposite, during an exam, the hands fly about the circular clock face.

Anything requiring the passage of time can teeter or totter, almost arbitrarily. Turning old enough to be able to do something:

1. Join a club, team, or participate in age-related extracurricular
2. Drive a car
3. Graduate high school
4. Buy alcohol or cigarettes (although the latter isn’t as popular as it was in my day)
5. Get a body piercing
6. Get a tat
7. Vote
8. Go to college
9. Graduate
10. Go to post grad school
11. Graduate
12. Go for a PhD
13. Graduate
14. Get a job
15. Get an apartment
16. Lose the body piercing
17. Get a J.O.B.
18. Get another tat … and more piercings
19. Get married
20. Buy a house
21. Have children
22. Feed, house and clothe the kids
23. Take them to clubs, teams, and other extracurricular
24. Get them a car
25. Go to their high school graduation
26. Sign the permission form for their first body piercing
27. Move them into their freshman dorm room
28. Smile weakly in reaction to their first tat
29. Offer them their first glass of wine
30. Attend their college graduation
31. Co-sign for their first apartment
32. Attend their post college degree graduation
33. Co-sign their student loan for their PhD
34. Celebrate their first job
35. Take them and their fiancé out to dinner for the first time
36. Go over the budget for the wedding
37. Cry at the wedding
38. Go on a cruise
39. Downsize to a condominium
40. Take pictures of the first grandchild
41. Announce your divorce
42. Move to an apartment
43. Retire
44. Move to a senior living facility
45. Meet with the lawyer and finalize the will

Numbers one through 14 pass slower than molasses going up hill on a 20 degree day with a 45 mile-per-hour headwind.

Fifteen through 45 happen quicker than the snap of a finger. The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate finger*.

After a bit of time had spilled down the drain, I noticed something. The years aren’t like some straight roadway that disappears in the desert at some unseen infinite point. The years are more like a Slinky, recurring coils where the four seasons have claimed a spot on the circumference of each coil. Depending on what is going on, the Slinky of time stretches and compresses. For the first million or so years of the planet, for example, the slinky is stretched nearly to its limit. As life developed and evolved, and as humankind (oxymoron) grew in number and impact, the coils compressed.

Today, the Time Slinky is tightly compressed, almost to the point of the annual coils melding into one another.

That’s comforting to some extent. It means even though Time is zipping along at breakneck speeds for me, we will make it through this particular phase of time, and perhaps the coils will then relax, and begin to stretch out again, the tension loosen.

I hope so.

*The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award was a commentary staple on a popular television comedy show that ran in the late 60s through the early 70s – Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. More like a pfft on the Time Slinky. I always thought the finger on the award should not have been the index finger, but one over.