Everyone knows time is relative. Even before Albert Einstein put a set of brilliant numbers to this ancient intuition, we knew it in our bones. And yet, this truth hits you especially hard when a friend tells you something like, "I see my parents about twice a year," and his parents live in the same Chicago he does...!
That gets you thinking. Maybe in their relationship twice a year is a actually just about right, whereas in another family twice a week wouldn't be enough. Al was right -- it's all relative. How long it should take for our economic recovery to click into place, for our potholes to be repaired, for the Cubs to win a World Series -- it's all relative.
If, then, life comes down to the tick of time, inevitably we're faced with evaluating these ticks relative to our life. For example, there's at least three cosmic categories: Slow time...fast time...eternal time.
Slow time is when you're a kid waiting for Christmas to get here, a guy waiting for the gal to say yes, for that big promotion to come through. Each tick has the slow, ponderous sound of Big Ben announcing that wide canyon between you and your goal. Slow time can be cruel, it's your enemy, it's insidiously reluctant to give itself up.
Now here's the irony -- fast time can be just as much an enemy. As in the case of a spectacular vacation whooshing past much too fast, a long-time life together hurrying by sooner than your hearts would wish, a world you both knew now hurtling ahead into frontiers of change you find hard to approve.
That third category -- eternal time -- that one Einstein never gave any formulas to. Actually he couldn't, for it looms larger than mere numbers can quantify. From the time we swung from trees right up to now when we swing from stars, eternal time neither ticks nor clicks. The eye can't observe it, the mind can't dissect it, only the heart can sense it. It is the unmapped distances that stretch out between the Eternal Now our carpe-diem proselytizers speak of, and the Eternal Eternal our poets and philosophers speak of.
Will Rogers once said, "The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for." I imagine he was talking about slow and fast time things. Eternal time things -- well, we're in line for that whether we want to be or not. Which makes spring 2009 as good a time as any for my friend to visit his parents more often, and for my country to visit our best dreams more often.
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a good trick is to embrace slow time in the ordinariness of each day.
ReplyDeleteI can't help myself -- but what you say here is so much of what my favorite play OUR TOWN says! Anyone out there who hasn't seen the current Chicago production with David Schwimmer is missing three remarkable acts of slow, ordinary wisdom.
ReplyDeleteLet's put the Cubs winning the world Series in eternal time category. They are something to me no longer worth waiting in line for. I find myself feeling so much better not having to live with the highs and lows of victory and defeat. We are doing the walks of Chicago this spring and summer.
ReplyDeleteWhile embracing slow time is a lovely thought, some people don't have that luxury when they don't know where their next meal is coming from! Embracing slow time is something some of us can only dream about!
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