READY, GET SET, GO: TIME IN!

By Edwin Cooney

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you…
But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them
I’ve looked around enough to know
That you’re the one I want to go
Through time with

Nearly forty years -- and Jim Croce’s individual lifetime -- have passed since we first heard him sing those words to us. Scientific scholars tell us that our existence has at least four dimensions—height, breadth, width and time. It is said that we live in three of these dimensions: height, breadth and width because to a large extent we have control (if not entire mastery) over them.

The fourth dimension, time, we merely experience. We can comprehend it, even measure and regulate it within constraints, but we cannot know where and when it began or when it will end for us.

Two factors in my personal life have brought time to my immediate attention lately. I belong to a Friday religious discussion group in my church which has been reading a book called “Spiritual Envy.” Its author is a delightful gentleman, a local talk show host and professor of literature at Cal Berkeley named Michael Krasny. Dr. Krasny has, for much of his lifetime, been struggling with his own agnosticism and this book is about that struggle. Chapters eleven and twelve deal with “Accursed Time” and with “Escaping Time.”

Additionally, on the very day, this date, that your computer receives this writing, my oldest lad, Eric, is celebrating his thirty-third birthday. On Tuesday, March 7th, 1978, the day he was born, I was thirty-two years, three months, and eight days old. His mother had just celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. Since that splendid day, much has changed. Eric is now grown, his parents are divorced and living in separate states, and he has become a solid American citizen. Since the time that he was born, America has passed from the age of television into the age of the internet and nano technology. In world affairs, the threat to our security by “Godless Communism” has been replaced by the threat of radical religiosity. Still, time marches on.

What concerns you and me the most now are the following questions:
What do I want to do with the rest of my life?
What are my resources to accomplish that which might most please or fulfill me?
How much energy do I have or will I need to realize that fulfillment?
Who can help me to marshal the resources and energy to achieve my goal or goals?

Then there comes the ultimate question:
How much time do I have to do what I may?

In a column I wrote back on December 29th, 2007, I asserted that time was mankind’s invention rather than being a force of nature. I pointed out that we’ve only been keeping exact time for approximately six hundred years. The first spring-loaded clock was invented by Peter Henlein of Nuremberg about 1510. Nearly a century and a half later in 1656, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, designed the first pendulum clock and enclosed it in wood. By the early 1700s, men of means were actually carrying watches with them.

Since I made that observation, friends of mine possessing a much greater intellectual capacity than I have pointed out that my observation is only an element of humankind’s capacity to measure and utilize even the forces that it doesn’t entirely understand. So I stand corrected!

What I do know, as I age ever so gently into my mid-sixties, is that an end is inevitable and it’s as natural as being born. I believe deeply that we need not fear what will come. Whatever pain or discomfort we may encounter is largely man-made by conception, infliction or lifestyle rather than being a gift of the “ravages of time.”

Time is a tool to measure that which is measurable, but we know from our own life experience that many powerful phenomena such as philosophy, friendship, and especially love resist measurement. Those who insist that they depend only on what’s provable -- as I see it -- are suffering from a severe case of denial.

It would appear and I would certainly hope—as do his mother and brother--that my thirty-three year-old has much more time than I do to realize his ultimate professional, personal and/or spiritual fulfillment. Still, one never knows and, since one never knows, the measurability of time, demanding as it can be, may be ultimately a mere illusion.

Every week in the introductory message I attach to each column I thank you for the time you take to read what I write—and (as I see it) I owe that to you as a reader. Years ago, St. Louis Cardinal sports announcer Jack Buck used to close his post game show in the following way which I’m about to use in closing this week’s effort:

Thanks for your time this time -- and till next time, please consider this as being…

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED.
EDWIN COONEY