As promised: Here’s another story written by Don Tschirhart and more in keeping with the book he was compiling. Notice that the title reads just like how a headline would be written in a newspaper . . . Once a ‘newsman’, always a . . .
Thanks for reading,
David T
Time: Quest marches on
I’m looking for “time.” Time is a “thing” so I should be able to find “it.” Right?
Have you finally flipped your cork, Don? If you want to find time, look at your watch.
Naw! Everyone knows “time” is a lot more elusive than that.
My young barber friend, Adam, spoke philosophically while giving me a trim. A philosophical barber? I guess there are a few around.
He asked me about “time.” I gave him the usual answer.
“That’s not what I mean,” he said, and proceeded to quote an obscure paragraph in a dull 800-page machinery programming manual.
“The concept known as time is a unique phenomenon. It cannot be seen, held, touched, weighed or stored. Yet we use its measurements every day”
Adam said he finished the manual and then began to think about the meaning of “time”. When someone like Adam begins to think, stand aside.
So I began to think and began my search for the meaning of “time.” Like Adam, stand aside.
Where did I start? Where else? In my closet. That’s where I found one of my better sweatshirts. Printed on block letters: “So many books! So little time” I know that. Every time I go to my Imlay City library I find I’m scratching the surface of the zillion books I want to read.
Like any modern researcher I turned to the internet. We all know people on the internet are smart. I asked a few of my sons and friends about their concept of time.
“Sorry, I have no time,” my son, Tim, flipped back at me from Boston. My sister-in-law, Dorothy, said from her Sterling Heights home, “Don, you’re taxing my brain. I don’t have time to think. Time weighs heavy when you have too much of it and goes quickly when there isn’t enough.”
“Isn’t it ‘time’ that someone wrote a song about time,” a delightful friend from nearby Holly, Margaret, wrote. Paul, my lawyer brother from New Jersey, asked, “Isn’t there a magazine by that name.” I’m sure he was kidding me when he added, “Don’t retirees already have too much ‘time’ on their hands?”
I answered him, “If I had only a little time, do you think I’d be starting this quest to find ‘time’.”
Jim, a Grand Rapids business executive and friend said, “Time is something I chase every day and never catch. If I lose it, I can’t replace it.” He added: “Good question, Don.”
I thought I might find “time” at the library.
Inventor Thomas Edison, ever the optimist, said, “I’m long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.” Author Eric Fromm said, “Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains — except to kill it.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the famous aviator, said in the 1940s when there was a shortage of nylon hose, “Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.”
Let me tell you about the 1752 “time” riots in London, England when Parliament proclaimed a change in the old Julian calendar reducing that year by 10 days. Angry landlords rioted saying they were cheated out of 10 days rent.
Did I complete my quest? Did I find “time?”
I found there are as many explanations of time as there are minutes in a lifetime. I promised myself to continue searching for time.
When people search for something even as elusive or as silly a quest as searching for “time,” they live for something.
Maybe we should say that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once, including my finding “time.”
Of course, theologians will tell you that when you die, time stands still. There is no time in the after life.
I prefer to spend that “NO time” in paradise.
