Time is the darnedest element.
I mean – does it really exist?
As mankind has evolved, we’ve found there is this 365-day journey we take around the sun, which is identified as one year. Every four years, we add a day to February to get 366 days in that year. Our months are broken up into 30 or 31 days…
Except February…
Sure…
Why February I ask? And who decided?
We have a 24-hour clock, with the extra added attraction of Daylight Savings Time (DST) to add to the confusion. People are worn out with the time change every spring and fall. One little old hour. It screws us up, especially if we forget to change the clock. In the spring, we lose an hour. In the fall – we get it back.
WTH?
For one thing, Daylight Savings Time is but an illusion. We’re not saving daylight – we’re relocating it. Light at Dusk. Dark at Dawn.
Well, what the hell is that? So, farmers can have one additional hour of soil tilling, planting, and harvesting? Works for them. It ain’t working for the rest of us. Makes more sense for them to rise at dawn before the weather gets hot. Because these folks enable us to eat, we’ve no right to complain.
Splain Daylight Savings to me. What are we really saving here? Children head to school in the dark – but get to play longer when school lets out. That’s of little comfort when they get hit by a car enroute to school or the bus stop in the darkness of dawn by someone late for work.
“Oh, sorry kid….didn’t see you…”
It is true no one invented time. Time is an element of the universe. Earth rounds the sun. Our sun rounds the galaxy. Our galaxy cruises the cosmos. Call this a vast cosmos metropolis. Consider this over your morning coffee – we’re never in the same place from moment to moment. Does anyone really know how fast we are moving through the solar system and the cosmos?
We’re always in motion at dizzying speed.
Mankind has developed a system of keeping time in order to chart a schedule for each day, month, and year. It is surely true man created a system of timekeeping in order to keep track of this thing called time. It can be traced back to the Sumerians and Egyptians who brought us the 24-hour day some 3,000 years ago. These folks were pretty smart people void of computers and the internet.
Now stay with me on this.
Sundials were a clever means of tracking daylight via the sun’s shadow, which makes you wonder how that worked with the changing seasons. Another system of time keeping was the Water Clock, which was a means of tracking time when the sun went down. And yeah – I don’t get it. Mechanical “tick-tock” clocks came along in the 14th century in order to give us more precision timekeeping around the clock.
The swinging pendulum showed up in the 1600s for an even more precision approach to measure time. It becomes even more complex when you consider the 24 time zones, which were conceived to chart time across the globe. Where I am completely lost is the International Date Line, which makes me want to ask friends in Australia and New Zealand what time it is there, to which they answer, “You bloody bloke, it’s 3 am!!!”
With all this time chatter out of the way, boomers are more interested in the “how did we get here so quickly?” part. Time is a physical fact. Our perception of time is as unique as we are. When you were a kid in school, time moved at a snail’s pace. We watched the clock, waiting for recess. When we were entering junior high, didn’t graduation from high school seem an eternity away? How about sitting in Social Studies or Math, watching the clock, waiting for the bell?
Bowie, Maryland’s Somerset Elementary School – circa 1962. The future was ours, with the promise of future. We really have changed the world around us.
We graduated from high school and college with feelings of sadness – and promise. The future was ours to have and to hold. We had not yet been adults; with the responsibilities our parents had. For most of us, our parents had been through The Great Depression and a world war. We didn’t know the world was going around.
So, here we are, with most of our parents gone, wondering what happened to time. The eldest of us are pushing 80, with those of us to follow cresting 70. Boomers have little reason to lament. For those of us still here, we’ve been handed Life – the precious air we breathe, the sunlight, a rumble of thunder, the sound of kids playing in the street, the rustle of fall leaves soon upon us.
Grateful for the life we’ve been handed – always hoping for a better tomorrow.
Boomer Journey... 