Time: The Soul of the World

We forget pain and remember the happiness. We forget the horror and remember the beauty. Sometimes, we don’t remember it quite the same as someone else. The prisoner does time. The lover takes time. The teacher gives time. The scholar uses time.

Senaca taught that whatever begins also ends, and Thoreau pointed out that you can’t kill time without injuring eternity, and Jimmy Walker said that counting time is not as important as making time count. And finally, Ben Franklin said, “Dost thou love life? Then waste not time; for time is the stuff that life is made of.”

The only REAL time exists now – as you read these words. It is the present. Minutes ago, when you began this article, it was the past. Now the past is not real – although it WAS real when you experienced it. A clock is only a depiction of time. An hourglass is thoughtless and insulting, as it throws time into your vision, into your brain, grain of sand by grain of sand, And when all the sand falls, there is no time left. What a thought!

Does time have a beginning? If so, will there be an end to time. These are simple, childlike queries, and you might be interested to know that a fellow named Zecharia Sitchin knows the answer. You’ll find it in his four-volume treatise, “When Time Began.” The easiest way to summarize his theories, is to understand that time began when the universe began. Even though we don’t know what time is, we measure it. And if we measure something, it must exist. It’s almost like a riddle: You can’t touch it, smell it or feel it, but you can measure it. What is it?

We do know that the earth was created from some cosmological mass that split into millions of pieces. One large piece was the earth. Whether it took six days, six eras, six epochs or six millennia, cells divided and animals were created. Do animals have a sense of time? There is a multitude of answers for this conundrum, since no one has ever questioned an animal. Dog owners note that their pets are as excited upon their return after a five minute absence, as after a week or a month. Rats have been tested by a fellow named William Roberts at the University of Western Ontario. He could not prove that rats retain the same sense of time as humans. They do retain their own sense of time – recalling an incident, but not the time of it. This seems related to language in humans. A human can understand a sense of timing and relate it to another. A human senses seasonal and daily changes that relate to time.

Nevertheless, the first inkling of time measurement was found by archeologists who discovered the Sumerian Epic of Creation on a series of stone tablets. These people understood the universe, the planets, the movements of the heavens and their own relation to all of this. Today we wonder whether time flows forward and if it has a beginning. Is time a dimension? E = mc2. Everything is relative.

What is time? Swift and measureable, invisible and inevitable.. I like Jean Herrick’s answer:

Made bitter-sweet from fruts of life

There’s a wine; It quenches every human thirst –

We call it time.