Our Time, and Nature’s Time

Humankind, over the course of centuries, has figured out how to measure time with progressively greater precision. From ancient water clocks that marked off only hours to contemporary atomic clocks that can divide a mere second into billionths, the desire to mark off time more precisely has been part of the human story. Nevertheless, in our everyday lives, we often don't know how to handle time in a way that satisfies us perfectly. That ancient human challenge endures, despite all our Day-Timers and appointment software.

ancient sundial

In 2nd-century Rome, where public sundials became unusually widespread, the playwright Plautus complained:

"The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours!

Who in this place set up a sun-dial,

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions."

I'm glad, for his sake, that Plautus is not alive today, experiencing how we cut up time into quarter-hours and, in the case of athletes, fractions of a second.

I was provided a quite different perspective on time when my wife told me about something she observed on a T.V. cooking show.  The chef showed the viewers a clam the size of my wife's fist, pointing out the rings on the shell that marked off periods of growth.  Then -- after explaining that the clam was 200 years old -- the chef opened it, pulled out the small body inside, and chopped it into a few pieces for consumption.  My wife said she felt there was something not right about it:  200 years of life gone, and in just a few gulps.  (I have imagined what a different scenario it would be if the little clam had been kept alive in an aquarium for fascinated visitors to peer in at it and be amazed.)

So what are we to make of time?  What is time itself, after all?  It is not something easily thought about in the abstract by average minds.  Even the quite intelligent St. Augustine in the 4th century said that he thought he easily knew what time was -- until he tried to say exactly what it was. Indeed, when we want to think about time, we have to either mark off time in measurements or compare ourselves to something like a mountain or a clam.  And as we do so, the sun rises and sets, and the Earth tilts back and forth on its axis, both unaffected, but encompassing our lives in regular natural cycles.

Despite all our measuring of time, despite all the synchronizations demanded by our modern urban societies, there is also a phenomenon almost every person has noticed:  Namely, that time, in fact, seems to drag at times and at other times go by so quickly.  The early 20th-century Christian writer Henry Van Dyke put it so insightfully and poetically:

"Time is

Too Slow for those who Wait,

Too Swift for those who Fear,

Too Long for those who Grieve,

Too Short for those who Rejoice;

But for those who Love

Time is not."

~~~

Does time ever challenge you?  How?

(The Plautus quote is taken from

The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin, © 1983.)
(The original form of Van Dyke's poem [the last word of which is frequently misquoted as "eternity"]
 can be read at this external link: The Works of Henry Van Dyke, Vol 1. © 1921.  p. 259)