Time … that old b******d!
Well, the time may be now. But what is this thing called time? It rules our lives like an invisible, omnipotent god. It makes a more than regular appearance in our everyday language. It heals all wounds (… apparently. I’m still waiting … but that’s not for today.) It waits for no-one. You can be ahead or behind it. You can be in the nick of it, race against it and you can have it on your hands. It is our past, present and who the hell knows what time may mean for any of us in the future. When you are young, it seems there’s plenty of it ahead but then it starts to fly… Old Father Time’s tick-tock-tick seems for all the world to set a faster pace now than before. What we thought once was our friend becomes the arch-enemy we struggle to defy, subjugating ourselves helplessly to the inevitability of its passing.
There are days when I throw my hands in the air in desperation at the passing of time. Because that old bastard, Old Father Time, sucks. As the name of this blog suggests, I also suck. I suck out all the marrow of life. I really do – I try my best: past, present and future. I stick up my finger – ruefully – at my life’s seemingly endless bad plot lines (you couldn’t make this shit up, believe me) and try, in vain usually, to re-write the script (the author is a stubborn old … oh, never mind). I suck, I have sucked and I will continue to suck! But, let’s get real for a second here, sometimes I suck at sucking. Because as I suck, it sucks too. Time sucks. Time has sucked, does suck and will probably suck in the future too. As I am busy sucking out all the marrow of life, that bloody old bastard is doing the same thing to my life. To me. To my body – as if chewing and gnawing away at my carcass, at my very being, until my bare bones are tossed into the dirt stripped, exposed, unprotected. Such is the helplessness I feel at the mercy of the cruel, degenerative diseases which pursue me so relentlessly.
Both physically and mentally, it is painful, frightening and tiring. Tick-tock-tick-tock goes the Grandfather clock: time is vanishing before my very eyes. Die Zeit geht dahin. The worst is, no matter what I try, like Strauss’s Marschallin, I cannot seem to stop all the clocks.
Yet, I go on sucking – as hard as my lips and cheeks will allow.
4 Replies to “Time … that old b******d!”
I just read this passage in a novel I am reading and it made think of this post. It is a comforting thought but as the author says, he is not there yet but finds solace in the idea. Just wanted to share as it seems relevant to your struggle with time x
What if there’s no such thing as time? If everything we experience is eternal, and it’s not time that passes us by, but we ourselves that pass by the things we experience? I often ask myself this. It would mean that while our perspective would change and we would distance ourselves from treasured memories, they would still be there, and if we could go back we would still find them in the same place. Like leafing through a book backwards, perhaps even back to the beginning. My father would eternally go for evening walks with me in the park, and Alva and I would be perpetually captured on our trip to Italy, sitting in the car at night and driving towards a future full of hope. I try to console myself with this thought, but I can’t feel it yet. And I can only believe what I feel.
I think it is part of the human condition; the awareness of time and that there is only one inevitable end to it for all of us. It unique to us but I think I would happily be an animal and forgo that special awareness. I am not sure it enhances my life as I don’t suck like Simon
I’m not convinced it’s unique to humans
Going back to my point about awareness of the passing of days and seasons, before “time” had a label and a means of measurement was calculated, we were no different from any other organism that regulates it’s behaviour, according to the environment in which it finds itself?
We would have been instinctively aware of birth, growth & death, in the same way any animal is. The past, present and future still existed but purely as abstract ‘sensations’. T
An awareness & understanding of the differences and the consequences thereof, became unique to humans with two developments, the use of tools (including fire) and language?
One allowed us to adapt our surroundings to “foil” our environment. the other allowed us to share thoughts, process ideas, ask questions, teach etc. and at some point develop systems for measuring what we recognised as the non physical “space” between two events, but had no label for?
“But what is this thing called time”?
The answer is….it isn’t.
It doesn’t exist.
We measure “time” to give us structure and to give our universe order.
We perceive an abstract, we call “time”, to mark changes that happen between one point and another.
We allow “time” to regulate almost everything in our lives, because if we didn’t, life as we know it, could not exist.
But “time” itself does not exist, where humans are not there to construct it.