We are never more than a glance away from answering the question, “What time is it?” The answer is on our wrist, in our pocket, glowing from the wall. There’s a clock beside the bed, on the dashboard, in the break room, on the phone, and embedded in every device we own. We can answer that question instantly. Yet we struggle mightily with a far more interesting one: “What is time?”
Try answering it without consulting a reference—no googling allowed. What is time?
Britannica offers this: “a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions.” Does that help? It didn’t help me either.
Time—the so‑called fourth dimension—is not something we can see, hear, smell, or taste. We see wrinkles in the mirror, hear the deepening voice of a teenager, smell the milk that has turned in the fridge, and taste the sharpness of an aged cheddar beside it. We witness the effects of time, but time itself remains elusive, abstract, and stubbornly beyond our grasp.
My own experience suggests that time stands perfectly still—until we notice it. Then it sprints ahead, racing to catch up with the hands on the clock or the numbers on the calendar. When I was a child, in those halcyon days before the school bell taught me to watch the second hand, time was measured in daylight and dark, breakfast and supper, playtime and bedtime. Days stretched into endless adventures; nights were mysterious and inviting. Time has a way of polishing the good memories and blurring the bad ones, but who doesn’t cherish some image from the days before we learned to count the hours until the weekend?
“Art is long and time is fleeting…” and soon enough the conditioning begins. In preschool we learn schedules. Bedtimes grow stricter. Lazy mornings give way to the rise‑and‑shine ritual before the carpool or the bus. Our awareness of the clock sharpens. Every classroom has one, and every hour is punctuated by a bell loud enough to make Pavlov nod in recognition.
Gradually we learn to identify with the number attached to our journey around the sun. Once every cycle, beginning at an early age and every year thereafter, we sit in a circle around a ceremonial fire and chant an incantation that binds us to time and mortality. Then we blow out the birthday candles. For the rest of the sun’s journey until the next ceremony, we are that age—and we carry the burdens of expectation that accompany it.
After twelve or thirteen years of this training—sitting at uncomfortable desks, losing moments in anticipation of the next bell, waiting for lunch, for recess, for dismissal—we graduate to bigger desks and wait for the five‑o’clock whistle and the weekend. A few years into the “real world,” we develop a kind of self‑hypnosis to ferry our consciousness across the tedious waters of the forty‑hour week. The wonder of childhood, the ability to live fully in the moment, has nearly vanished. On Monday we fast‑forward to Friday, to the annual vacation, to retirement.
Seize the moments, my friends. We cannot escape the schedules of modern life, but we do not have to be enslaved by them. In my own efforts to slow the rush of time, I keep my watch in my pocket—if I carry it at all. The dashboard clock, the radio, the phone, the bank marquee will get me where I need to be. The moments between those reminders are mine.
Unless we are careful, we may one day reach that long‑awaited shore of retirement—when time is once again our own—and look both backward and forward with dismay. The calendar tells us our days are numbered, yet the years since childhood seem impossibly brief. If we have lived sixty‑five years, we will have been alive for more than thirty‑four million minutes. How many will we truly recall? How many moments will we manage to grasp in the headlong rush?
The question makes me want to turn the clock to the wall and take a walk in the woods. What about you.
Outside The Box 