Time

Leo Lawton

When we are born, our clock starts. When we die, it shatters to be used by no other. The only thing given to us at birth is a certain amount of time on this earth. It is a reducing debit account with an unknown balance.

When we are very young we have little say in how our time is spent. Our parents nurture us in every way, acceding to our needs, yet our time account diminishes. With good parents, this varying amount of time is well spent in the formation of our bodies and our minds.

As we age, with a depleting time balance, less of our time is spent in the dictations of our parents, teachers, and other mentors, and more in the pursuit of our own desires.

The constitution of the United States guarantees us the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No person, no group, or no government can guarantee you those things. Your only guarantee is your remaining amount of time.  It’s all you ever had.

Since the beginning of the human race we have tried to divide time into recognizable segments so that we might structure our lives in an orderly fashion. It is time to eat. It is time to sleep. It is time to whatever. This is a misnomer. What we are really thinking is, beginning at this time I will use a portion of my allotted time on earth to eat, sleep, or whatever.

As most of us think of time, we associate it with our planetary system. It takes one year for our planet to go around the sun. Our planet rotates once each day. Our day is split into twenty-four one-hour segments, and our hour is divided into sixty minutes for no apparent reason. Why they are called this I do not know, but they have nothing to do with the passing of time. They only designate our perceived idea of it. Time continues to pass, no matter what we call it, or how we divide it. Time has nothing to do with our planetary system. It is merely a method that humans have devised to identify blocks of it. Time is forever. It never began. It will never end. It goes on incessantly. Only things change. Time is infinity.

When we have used up our allotted segment of time, our account is empty, our balance is zero, and our requests for more go unanswered.

Value

Because we have a finite amount of time most people place a value on it.  Value in this sense means how much of our time should we, or must we, allocate for an equivalent amount of something else?  It thus becomes imperative for us to trade our time wisely for those products more easily obtained from someone else than manufactured by ourselves.