Off the Clock, But Forever on Time

Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to
be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They
live, unquestioning, in the moment.

~ Christopher Morley, Where the
Blue Begins

Hmmm, are we condemned
to be slaves to the clock?

It seems I am
approaching the 10th anniversary of being on Twitter. So nice of
Twitter to revamp their page design to mark the occasion. Never mind that it
annoys me to no end to have to figure out what all the perplexing new icons
mean.

Frankly, it seems much
longer since I ventured into social media. It has grudgingly become a habitual
component of my life as if it is something I have always done. And that
perception has given me pause to stop and ponder how my experience of time has
changed.

Strictly speaking, time
is absolute – measured by ticks on the clock and divided into precise
increments. 60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 24 hours in a day
and so on.

However, our experience
of time is very subjective. We reach for metaphor to wrap our minds around it.
We say that time flies when we are
having fun. It drags when we would
rather be somewhere else than where we are. (A day at work comes to mind.) We
bemoan how it gets away from us or catches up with us.

So which is true?

Is time absolute and
never changing – ticking away with infuriating consistency?

Or is relative and
subject each person’s state of mind on any given day?

An
aside: In the Bible’s
Old Testament, people lived to be 800 or even 900 years old. Dear God, what a
thought! But is that the same measure of time as the current era when reaching
100 is beating all the odds? I can say for certainty that my body would not
hold up that long.

I am inclined to
believe, notwithstanding the judgemental clock glaring at me across the room,
that we each have the ability and the freedom to mark time as we chose. We do
not have to be slaves to the clock and its endless revolutions around the face.

A few years down the
line when I retire and do not have to punch the clock (pun intended) five days
a week, I may just ditch my wristwatch, take the battery out of my clocks and
thumb my nose at time. Daylight savings time be damned!

When that day comes, I
will always be on time no matter how slow or fast I move.

~  Now Available Online
from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of
Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is also
the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel which
was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s
website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .

~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go
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