“Whatsoever things are . . . lovely . . . think on these things.” Philippians 4:8
Funny How Time Gets Away
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
Dallas, TX
Sometimes time drags.
The teenager waiting for his driver`s license perceives time as his mortal enemy. The excited young child finds Christmas so long in coming that even the sun must be standing still in the heavens. The still classroom-bound young adult ready to go out and conquer the world, full of vinegar and spizzarinktum (if you were from Van Zandt County in rural East Texas, you wouldn`t have to wonder about the meaning of that impressive word), it seems that tomorrow will never come. Shakespeare got the point when he had the weary Macbeth say to Seyton, the officer attending him, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time."
Yes; sometimes time drags.
Then again time flies.
This is one of those times for me.
For the seventeenth time since moving into the house where I now live, I am observing from my study`s west-facing picture window the apparent movement of the sun from its setting place about 40 degrees south of due west to the end of its seasonal journey about 40 degrees north of due west. The very middle of this six-months` journey is called, as we have been told, the vernal equinox. Easter has been rather arbitrarily set as the first Sunday after the first full moon following this vernal equinox. Our central Christian holiday is thus seen to be determined by the tilting of the earth on its axis so that the setting sun seems to move south to north and then back north to south, south to north, north to south with the changing seasons. Whereas that movement used to seem to me to drag along in agonizingly slow motion, it is now in a runaway mode, zip, zip, running north like a scalded dog as the days get longer and then turning around to tear back south with the days getting shorter and shorter. As I say, zip, zip. Slam bam, thank you ma`am.
A thousand years ago Omar Khayyam wrote, "The Bird of Time has but a little to flutter-and the Bird is on the Wing."
And Willie Nelson has plaintively sung, "Ain`t it funny how time gets away."
Of course he doesn`t mean funny "ha ha" or funny peculiar. He means funny sobering, funny inexplicable, funny profound.
My old-man thoughts, prodded to the surface by this azimuthal movement, or rather this appearance of the seasonal movement of the sun, now turn naturally to time itself. Relativists have proposed that time is merely a fourth dimension of space; but this gets a little heavy for me. My Encyclopedia Britannica allows "that time is fundamental and there is nothing similar or simpler to compare it with." Right on.
Philosophical ponderings about such things tend to lead me off into water that is too deep. There comes to mind the classic definition that such philosophizing is like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that is not there. So, I am inclined to take time for granted, glancing desultorily at my watch now and then and then consulting the calendar from time to time only to forget forthwith both the time and the date so as to miss important obligations, appointments, and opportunities. Could it be sure proof that I have passed my allotted fourscore years?
As only the fool says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14:1), so I feel that we need not foolishly posit the opinion that there is no such thing as time. Yet, who of us has not sung these mysterious words in When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder: "When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more"? The songwriter clearly knew Revelation 10:6 where the angel standing astraddle of the land and the sea raises his right hand and swears by God "that there should be time no longer." The phrase can be translated in different ways; but we can nevertheless be reminded that eternity is defined as infinite time, unmeasurable time, endless time.
In my lifetime thus far, if I have figured this out with reasonable accuracy, my heart has beat already about 2,943,360,000 times. (If you want to know, I arrived at this numerical oddity by multiplying my average heartbeat rate of about 70 per minute times the 60 minutes in an hour times the 24 hours in a day times the 365 days in a year times my 80 years which I have lived thus far. Presto. About three billion beats.) No machine ever conceived by human minds or built by human hands comes anywhere near the efficiency or the longevity of this fantastic little pump, the human heart, about the size of a smallish grapefruit. But with its beats we number our days.
When there are no more beats left, there are no more days.
Time`s up.
I have been contemplating our creaturely existence "when time shall be no more."
This is a profundity with which nearly everybody seems to have wrestled: Solomon, Socrates, Newton, Einstein, and Thomas Wolfe with his Of Time and the River-and more recently Hawking, Pogo, Charlie Brown, and uncounted farmers, shepherds, disconsolate teenagers, long-haul truck drivers, and anxious, sleep-deprived mothers and fathers around the world distraught about their children.
Swimming in such deep waters may have some aerobic benefit for many, but I am personally more inclined to floating.
My friend Kenneth Chafin, redeeming the time, caught this floating concept in a moving piece he called "A Rhythm for My Life." I think he may have had some premonition of his approaching promotion to a better world. At least he had a finely mature awareness of the fleeting nature of time and the transience of the things of this world when he prayed to God
Help me to find a rhythm for my life
in keeping with my strength, my gifts,
my opportunities, my commitments,
and thy larger purpose.
Let there be a celebration of life,
the building of relationships,
and the nurturing of others.
Let there be unhurried strolls in the woods,
quiet mornings spent on the pond,
poking around country roads,
Afternoon naps in the porch swing,
leisurely meals with friends,
chickadees fed and zinnias grown.
Let there come to me a quietness of soul,
a relaxed body, an alert mind,
a gentle touch, an inner peace,
an integrity of being.
It`s time to do it.
As Snuffy Smith was wont to say, "Time`s a-wastin`."
