Time

Time is an extremely funny thing. A lot of philosophers can explain a lot of things ethics, morals, pain, suffering, god, and all that other crap, but have a very difficult time wrapping their minds around the concept of time. What exactly is time? We decided to divide it up into months, days, weeks, years, minutes, seconds, etc etc, but did we really catch time in a bottle? Being awake about 19 hours a day gives you plenty of "time" to ponder questions about time. I have become an expert on knowing when it is 11 minutes past the hour. Any hour, any time of day or night, I am able to sense it. It is actually kind of creepy, and scares me just a little bit. I also can chop time up very well into 9 minute intervals. This is because the alarm clock that I have possessed for almost 20 years has a snooze button that allows for 9 minutes. I am eerily able to wake up before the alarm goes off, and then hit snooze wait 8 minutes and hit snooze again. Of course, the older we get time seems to go by faster. It has something to do with the amount of "time" we have left I think. Those last few grains of sand seem to run out a whole lot quicker than the first few. Time travel is a favourite subjects of authors the world over since H.G. Welles posed that lovely "what if" question in the The Time Machine. Certainly, some us would love to go back in time, and change how we handled certain situations, but usually it would be futile. Going forward in time has its allure as well who wouldn't want to know their and the world's future? We waste so much time that it is silly. We spend a great deal of energy wishing time away. It is ever going to be 5 o'clock so I can go home? Time punishes us all, at least eventually. You can't bargain with time. You might bargain FOR more time, but usually that is pointless as well. Just try to waste one hour someday when you are NOT a home. Leave your house, and think where can I go for an hour? Maybe you have a movie you want to see, maybe you can go to a book store, or a friend's house, but just see if that hour does not seem to drag by ever so slowly. Deadlines are all about time. Something has to be done by a certain time, then time seems to just fly by. It compresses till it seems that minutes are zipping by at the speed of light. Time does funny things to all of us. We set great store by being on time to place, but we smile indulgently at people who would "be late to their own funeral." We have all had experiences in which we leave thinking "man, I wish I had the last 20 minutes of my life back." Even reading this post is, I am sure, killing/wasting someone's time. I know that writing certainly did mine.