Racing Time.
Everyone marvels at the speed of light. 186,000 miles in a second. The fastest anything can move according to Mr. Einstein.
But while we use light as a sense, as a mechanism to judge distance, as a constant in a universe that continually defies convention, we forget the other great component in our rush to understand the reality in which we all participate.
We forget the speed of time.
I will be turning 48 this month. 48 years on this planet; 48 revolutions in space around the star that gives us life.
During those revolutions, the earth has actually travelled almost 34 trillion miles in space, so it’s no wonder that I feel kind of tired sometimes. That’s a hell of a journey.
During those 48 years, I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon. Time is getting faster. Each year seems to pass just a little bit quicker than the previous one, and again I find the genius in Mr. Einstein’s proclamations. Time really is relative.
Although time actually moves at a speed according to local gravity, my subjective experience of time is based upon all that has happened to me, and is currently happening to me.
And all that may happen to me, in the time that I have remaining. And most of us have no idea how long that is.
As the season changes this year, I can sense my age. Not physically, but as a conscious entity. I feel time flowing through me, past me, relentlessly onwards. It will not listen to my hopes, my dreams, my desires, my fears. It will not give me one moment to repeat, one temporal mulligan in the stream of eternity.
It’s like Eminem says, we get “one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted, one moment”. I sense that moment is moving quicker now, and I feel an need to grasp it even tighter, living each day with a more powerful, more profound and more pressing urgency.
Have you ever stood in the evening, and realized that the sun is not setting, but that we are rising away from it, or that the thin atmosphere is all that shields us from the immense cold, dark, unforgiving realm of space.
I am starting to feel that way about time. Time has in different seasons been my friend, my jailor, my confidant and my companion.
But now it is starting to feel like my enemy, and it is moving faster. I have to live harder to catch up. Less time spent on the small and unimportant things. More time dedicated to my passion, my purpose, my responsibilities.
For now I am in race against time, until we both blend into eternity.
It’s time to run.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings