Everything big and small in our lives seems to revolve around time. We recently were reminded of the passing of time by celebrating the New Year and seeing “Father Time”. We all watched the clocks strike midnight for the New Year… it was a very special time. Another point in time is daylight savings. Spring forward and Fall back. Changing all of our clocks (except Arizona)… just a normal event in time. When we were small we learned that time is measured in specific units such as days, months, years, hours, minutes, seconds, decades, etc. We developed a sense of security about time and its various measurements. As I usually do enjoy poking fun at the everyday things that we all experience, never question, just accept and live with, I am reminded that the entire exercise regarding time and how we deal with it caused me to take a little time to write down the following observations. Recently I listened to a great set by George Carlin on You Tube talking about time and measurements that we all try to cope with but have difficulty defining. Let me know if you have experienced any of the following situations and accepted the words without question.
You go to a store to buy something and the sales person says to you- (wait a minute, this is 2021 and you probably need to know what a sales person is… those are the people who help you in a retail store. I know that today many stores no longer have sales people but for the sake of this article accept the premise that you are dealing with one.) The sales person says, “I’ll be with you in a minute.” You say “fine”. When 5 minutes pass you say nothing because you know that what she meant and what she said probably don’t jibe. If you were 10 years old you might reason that a minute is 60 seconds and when 60 seconds passed the sales person should then help you. In this scenario is a minute really 5 minutes or one minute or what? Who cares? Right!! How about when the sales person says “I’ll be with you in a second”. In a literal sense that would mean immediately, how many times has that meant 5 or 10 minutes. We never call them on this discrepancy in time. We are glad when they finally get around to helping us.
Try to measure some of these: You make a phone call and the person on the other end asks if you would mind holding for a “Moment”. But how do you know whether or not you want to hold that long because you don’t even know how long a “moment” is. How about half a moment? If you don’t know how long a moment is then you couldn’t possibly know how long half a moment would be.
John will be here to pick us up soon. If that’s hard to understand then let us clear that up by saying that John will be here pretty soon. I’ll do it as soon as I can. As soon as he can?
I can’t do it right now, it will be a while, or if that’s too long then it will just be a little while.
I should be through in just a shake. A shake? We never learned that one in school. To further complicate things, consider half a shake or two shakes.
We’ll be there in a jiffy. When you stop and think about our language and the complexity of its usage, you must wonder why we don’t all go stark raving mad.
When will you complete the job? I will finish it later. (later?) When is that?
We will take care of that tomorrow. But you said that yesterday. What day is this-Today. Then when is tomorrow?. Today is today, the next day is tomorrow. Then tomorrow never comes. (My barber has a sign in his barber shop that says “Free Haircuts Tomorrow”) In reality he is safe because that will never come. Then what happens after tomorrow? Why that’s the day after tomorrow. But if tomorrow never comes then how could the day after tomorrow ever come? You are really over thinking all of this time stuff. Let us talk about yesterday. What is it? The day before today. Yesterday is never today. But you said that yesterday was the day before today. What will today be tomorrow? It will be yesterday. This is actually starting to make sense. (Not) It is pretty elusive until you consider the day before yesterday-try to explain that one.
Who ever said that coping in today’s world was going to be easy. It is amazing that we all do as well as we do, but let’s face it, it would be very unsettling if everyone took everyone else literally. Nothing would ever get done. Have a good time each day. Be respectful of time. Try not to be late for appointments. If you are late don’t make the person wait too long. After all you will probably be there soon anyway. The unwritten rule in college was that you only had to wait 15 minutes for a professor to show up… then you could leave. In this scenario 15 minutes was exactly 15 minutes… no more, no less. I guess I learned to be respectful of time from my college professors. We only have so much time, enjoy every minute of every day, don’t worry about yesterday or tomorrow. Life is so wonderful and every day is precious.
