What's with this obsessive love-hate relationship with time that we have? Why do we keep it so tightly bound to our wrists, to our minds, to our moments?
We could never have enough of time. Today our concept of it rides upon ancient Babylonian ideas of the year and months and days, and we develop newer and newer methods to be more and more precise with its passing: down to milliseconds, nanoseconds---splitting hairs, strand upon strand upon strand but ultimately it is the same hair on the same head.
Time isn't that space between the ticks of the second hand. Nor is it the passing of Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday. Or the entire stew of concept of leap years, meridians, time zones and Mayan calendar. All of these are arbitrary labels assigned to measure the passage of human life.
Living is what time measures, and is also the measure of it.
The wind in your face when you open the car window at ninety or so miles per hour on an empty stretch of highway. That is time.
Wetness, while you walk under a drizzle in a June afternoon.
Or a long directionless conversation over coffee and cigarettes. That is time passing.
A nice nap after a good meal.
A photograph. That is time captured.
Or a night, when you fall asleep in the arms of that person you love, and your head is in that crook between the arm and the chest, and their breathing is soft and the air is flavored with them, and outside the stars burn as they have long burned before our time and as they will burn long after it, and there is nothing you really have to do or be or get to for the time being.
That is Time, with a capital T.
