Does Time Really Exist?

Even if we waste it?

Did you ever think about time when you were a child? No, I don’t mean how long until school is out? or how long until my birthday?

I mean, time, as in will I have enough? or am I spending it wisely?

Now, working on my memoir, I think about time a lot.

Specifically how much of it I’ve spent mindlessly. And how my parents perhaps didn’t think of it enough, until suddenly, the family was grown.

There’s no right and no wrong way to spend time, but now I mean to use it with intent. At least most of the time.

Way back when—I found an 1865 two-cent coin. I was in Eagle River Valley, Alaska, where the old Iditarod Trail had wound its way back in the Gold Rush era. I imagined it was lost by a long-ago miner. Was he short with a mustache? Portly, with a pack?

It felt as old as finding a dinosaur fossil to me, though it was minted exactly 100 years before I found it.

100 years doesn’t seem as long ago.

Now that I am well over the half-century mark myself, it seems nearly short.

I find myself thinking in terms of ancestors when I read a date — 1700? That would have only been my about seven lifespans before me.

No longer do I picture time as history, calendar, clock, and stopwatch. Now I see it as a river — wending and wearing itself through the geologic eras of the Grand Canyon. Some parts are worn away, and other things are left behind and it will continue after my time on earth is through.

Should we agree with Einstein, who wrote of his friend’s death,

Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.—Albert Einstein

Time is an entirely human construct.

Or does the definition of time depend on the existence of people to consider it, whether measured by moon phases, tides, or atomic clocks?

Animals live in the present, so they don’t dread their own eventual death the way we do. Have you seen a deer or other prey animal startled by a potential predator? They spring into motion, possibly running for miles. However, once that immediate danger is past, they return to browsing without worry and anxiety about what just happened.

Sometimes wish I could be more like an animal or a plant. I look out my window and see a live oak, probably more than 500 years old. Does it know it’s ancient?

How can we be human, function with a knowledge of time, and yet not be obsessed with its passing? Why, as we age, does time seem to speed up, just when we’d prefer it slowed down?

Something changed for me a few years ago.

I realized that my anticipated life span from that point was almost certainly less than 10,000 days. I valued them more, assessing how I spent each day — comparing it to how carefully I would choose if I knew I had only $10,000 to provide all I need for the rest of my life.

Would I pay the rent or find a friend to live with? Would I eat beans or steak? How to make sense of the most recent year which dwindled away? Can I get a ‘do-over’ on that one? Every 24 hours only slips by once and then is gone.

Time is not to be feared but valued.

Now, I feel pleasantly confident when I choose to play with my grandchildren instead of washing the kitchen floor. Or when I walk in the woods instead of punching my own time clock. When I was younger, far too often, I picked the less valuable option and missed moments of inestimable value.

Relaxing because now I think before I choose.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Perhaps my children will wish I’d left them a monetary inheritance when I am gone. Instead, what I want to leave is the model of time well-spent and choices made purposefully.

And the knowledge that life is valuable and time worth spending with intent.