Killing Time

“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.”

Dion Boucicault

I am almost 40 years old, and I have had an interesting first half of life by some standards, dull by others. I wonder what might have changed if I had to do it all over again. Of course I will not be given the opportunity to do it again; the second chances in life are always for the future, not the past. Today on the cusp of midlife, I feel as though time is slipping by, and I do not mean in the garden variety cliché sort of way. I mean it is going at warp speed and it is fucking with my head.

The last few years have seen a ratcheting up of the speed of time, or rather, my personal perception of time. The clock doesn’t run any faster, nor do the seasons come any other time than that prescribed by God and nature. The world on which I live is spinning the same orbits it has since creation first dawned in the void. Yet I feel as though the very foundations upon which my personal history rests are sliding, with increasing speed into space, never to be recovered.

It is almost as if the accumulated weight of the past is pushing the present against an implacable future. Tomorrow will come when it comes, it cannot be moved, and thus the present is compressed. This compression is the source of my concern, my near panic over the perception that time will continue to speed up till one day I awake an old man, wondering where my life went, evaporated in the heat of living.

“Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.”
Delmore Schwartz

Time has become my enemy; it steals from me every moment that passes into the past, puts more pressure on the present. How do I make it slow down? How do I make it feel more like it did ten years ago, or 25 years ago? When days seems to last forever, it seemed there was time enough to waste, time enough to accomplish everything that needed to be done, time enough to forge a good life. I asked a friend of mine with a bit more maturity resting on her shoulders than I, she said the only way to slow it down was to retire to the grave. Then time will have robbed the very breath from my lungs and time as I have known it will cease to exist. Then eternity awaits, and time will no longer matter.

The phenomenon appears to be a common thread among all people. I have canvassed men and women my age, younger people and older people as well. Everyone seems to sense the same thing with one notable difference. That it didn’t seem alarming to them, certainly not this feeling I have that time is rushing at break neck speed only that it was speeding up.

In an attempt to put this disconcerting feeling into perspective, I have given it much thought. The conclusions that I have come to are ethereal, and subtle, not concrete enough to be a law of nature. The first reason is that the accumulated experience of living changes what we expect of the present and the future. As children we do not understand the concept of tomorrow very well. Life is lived at the moment. When we mature we begin to realize that tomorrow does come and there are reactions and consequences as a result of how we lived in the past. As adults we also become very busy living, earning a paycheck, taking care of our children, and the thousands of mundane issues that crowed our modern lives.

Another poignant thought that occurred to me as I meditated on the problem, is that at midlife I have perspective, I have a history to review and years upon which to judge my current status.

Perhaps it is the feeling that I am dissatisfied by what I have accomplished in 40 years, mayhap I feel as though I am not where I had thought I would be on life’s path and there is now precious little time left to make it right. This realization is most likely the source of the problem, not only is there less time to do things, but there is more momentum behind.

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide. ~Mark Twain

There is another factor that interests me regarding time. I work with computers, and computers take up most of my day. I sit in front of a computer for many hours, earning a living. When the time comes to play I use the computer, when communications are needed I once again use the computer. In the not so distant past, a trip to a city 40 miles away might have taken all day. Now we can be there in under an hour. Imagine needing to meet with someone in another city in order to transact business, without a telephone, a computer, or a car. There would be letters, and then an odyssey on horseback to make it happen. I am coming to believe that these machines are partly to blame. I can stick my head in my work and whole days rocket into the past as if they didn’t happen at all. We have the world at our fingertips, we have communications at the speed of light, and we have instant gratification in the online world. In my lifetime there have always been phones and cars and airplanes. I wonder if others felt the same way when the world of horseback and telegraphs and the pony express was replaced with rocket ships, jet airplanes and fast cars with good roads upon which to speed. A different kind of revolution occurred in my life, the computer revolution. Just in the past decade or so we find the ability to call someone from anywhere to anywhere with a cell phone, the ability to send documents at the speed of light anywhere on the globe and instantaneous access to a seeming endless stream of information on demand.

What ever the reasons for the feeling that time gets faster and faster, I suppose the only antidote short of death is to use time wisely, and to use it in a way that promotes a goal. The machines are not going away, and time will continue to slip by with no resistance, no stops to make it slow. I wonder what revolution will happen in my children’s time, what new modern contrivance will make the time in their lives speed up to dizzying speeds? Whatever it may be, it is sure to affect me as well, unless I am beyond time by then, sleeping in a place where time is meaningless and the only deadline ahead of me becomes the day I am finally returned to the dust from which I came. Or another day in eternity and deadlines are just that, dead.

Scott L Freshour 11-21-05