The essence of time

I had been alive for 18 years 10 months and 5 days and in none of the 100 odd exams I had written till then did I run out of time.

Have any of you ever run out of time in an exam?

I tell you, I am a very time conscious man. By virtue of being human, that means that I automatically do not like you if you are unpunctual or not managing time well. This may be because of all the traumatic childhood experiences I have had with my parents. I vividly remember the day my mother said she was coming to pick me up from school at 9AM sharp – bear in mind school ended at 10AM, I was being smart. Lone behold, who’s car rocked up past 12 noon. I had enough time to re-watch 2 movies in full, make very good friends with my house master, which could be the reason why I became a prefect, but worst of all, I spoke to all my fellow dorm-mates whom were already at home whilst I was still at school. When anger strikes, one will tend to lash out in all the worst ways and on this day, I chose to give my mother the silent treatment, with minimal interaction. She eventually won me over on the way back with a pizza from a fast food restaurant. The size of my belly stands testament to the amount of times she has won me over.

But you must surely understand this feeling of being let down by other people when it comes to time. I like the principal George Washington, America’s First President, put in place in his life. He was known to always be punctual in any business he had and if you were late, he would leave. Once he wanted to buy some horses from a farmer. They had agreed to meet at 5AM. The salesman came 15 minutes late, and he was informed by caretakers that the buyer had moved on to other business and could only be seen again the following week. When I read this I was shocked, what other business could one have at 5 in the morning! On a lesser note, how can one have such a persistent passion for punctuality? Why would you want to live a near impossible life in this fast-paced world where we always seem to run out of time?

This led me to question this whole concept of time. One may then choose to look at their watch and ask me, what is so hard to understand about time. To that I respond in the words of Albert Einstein: Time is relative; it’s only worth depends upon what we do in its passing. Einstein went on to give the example of a man courting a girl for an hour which seems to pass in a minute as opposed to being burnt by a hot cinder for a second feeling like an eternity of pain. Our time is only as useful as we make it out to be. Another scientist, Kent Hovind, is well known for acknowledging space time and matter as a continuum. Meaning that these 3 must exist at the same time for there to be life or any existence whatsoever. Time may just be why we are alive. Dr Hovind put it this way, if there was space and matter but no time, when would you put it? If there was time and matter but no space, where would you put it? And if there was no Matter, what would you put there? Now we can begin to see the importance of time in life. It then leads on to an understanding of writing a narrative story in an English exam. The 5 W’s if you remember: Who, What, Why, Where, When.

Back to my exam, what did I do wrong? Well I never had time in mind, I felt I had all the time to do everything I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to. I messed up the first rule when taking an exam: Watch your time! All I needed was a bit more time, maybe I would have been able to sketch that one easy diagram better and maybe I would not be stressing about repeating the course next semester. But it is in the past. I look forward to any other exam knowing how much time I have and how to use it wisely.But I wonder if having more time or less time in life would have helped? Let us look back to what I said earlier. Firstly, what if my mother always came on time to school? Would I have still become a prefect? Would I have been less addicted to movies? How about this fat belly, would I carry it with pride still or would I be sexy model showing off a beautiful six pack, not that I cannot right now. What if George Washington had decided to wait for his unpunctual guest. He may have never become the President, just a lowly disorganized general. What if Einstein never investigated time and space. We would be living under a false pretense of our very own humanity all because of ignorance. But now we understand each other better and have found ways to make tedious and meaningless tasks more interesting.

What then can be said about time? Is it simply the seconds ticking by as we live our day to day lives? Or is time nothing more than a feeling and experience. Or is it the fiber that holds our very being? I will let you choose that for yourself. I am in control of my own destiny and everyone else has little to no say in it. It is my choice as to how my time is spent.

I would like to draw a tangent as I conclude. In the song ‘Holding On To You’ by Twenty-One Pilots, the lead singer sings this verse:

Fight it, take the pain, ignite it
Tie a noose around your mind
Loose enough to breath fine and tie it
To a tree tell it, you belong to me, this ain’t a noose
This is a leash and I have news for you
You must obey me.

Time is like the aforementioned tree. It is either it destroys you or you take control of it and make it work to your advantage.

Joel Osteen is well known for his analogy of time which talks about an ever renewing $86 400, the amount of money you have if you were given a $1 for every second you live. I do not entirely agree because, it is not right to compare money to time, without money one can make a life but without time one would not exist. I hope you take this home with you, time is not money, time is life!