Thursday, March 10, 2011

As Time Goes By



A few years ago I was living in the country and each day I would walk down to the store and buy groceries. It wasn’t really a long walk, but it was a boring one, especially on the way home carrying heavy bags. It was during one of these walks that I started thinking about time travel and how wonderful it would be if I could just snap my fingers and end up on my doorstep. I have thought a lot about time since then, about how important it is, and about how I could learn to manipulate it to my advantage.

You know as well as I do that sometimes time goes by really fast and sometimes really slow. It makes sense that time goes by faster when you are having fun and slower when you are doing something you do not like to do. Making time go by faster is easy, you just trick your mind into thinking that something boring is fun and if that is too hard then you can also just trick your mind into not thinking at all. Dividing time up into smaller portions also helps. Speeding up time has many benefits but slowing it down is more complicated and I am still working on that. I mean who wants to take something fun and make it boring? No one in their right mind would do that. The point is that time can be measured as a state of mind. Note; I say “Can be”, the catch is when other people come into play and start manipulating time for you.

The word time must be one of the most used words in the English language. Just think about how many times you use the word time and how many times other people use the word for you. In one sentence I used the word 3 times, oops there it is again. There is no escaping time. What would happen if all the clocks and watches in the world would just stop and no one could tell us what time it was anymore? I can imagine the chaos that would create! There would probably be sun dials in everyone’s front yard. Imagine, no one could tell you it was time to go to bed, time to get up, time to go to work, time to go to school, time to eat. We would all have to depend on our bodies to tell us what time it was. That would certainly create a problem for the work place and for the schools. Of course this will never happen. Time will continue to manipulate us instead of us manipulating time. As time goes by we set our alarm clocks, put new batteries in our watches, fill out time sheets, and in many ways gather to celebrate the passing of time. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying this is a bad thing. I just want you to think about it. Think about the time you are wasting, thinking about time.

Today I am going to try to go the whole day without mentioning the word “Time”. I am taking off my watch and avoiding time completely. Just for one day I want to be free to manipulate it as I see fit. I realize that time goes by whether I want it to or not, but today is one tiny moment in time where I get to decide how time goes by.

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