Wander project time slipping through our fingers...

Time is the one thing that escapes us. No matter what we do or how we prepare, time gets away from us. There are 8 hours in a workday (ok not closer to 10 most days). In the book (and movie) “About a Boy,” the narrator speaks of breaking a day into 15-minute increments. It is a process to help that person move through life; that wasn’t what they were looking for when they started. That is the problem with time; we have to look back. We have to look at now, and we need to look forward. But there is no manual for this process. There are so many science fiction books about traveling in time, Hugo Wells famously starting that milieu with his writing.

But time is a constant. It ticks every second. The atomic clocks throughout the world are accurate to within a millionth of a second over a century. The accuracy we have, tracking we have. We track time in days, weeks, months, and years. We store the memories in our hearts and minds, and from time to time, we pull them out. Some memories are musty and have that smell of improperly stored things. Some are fresh; we hold them up to the light to view them and relive that moment again as if we were still there. There are many schools of thought on the passage of time. Great minds have devoted years of their lives, figuring out how time trickles past us.

But perhaps the best, the most comfortable view of time is that it is sand on a beach. We can pick it up and fill our pockets with time. We can hold that time in our hands. But eventually, time will find the hole in our pocket; it will slip through the very skin of our hands. Time finds its way to its natural state. Time cannot be held; it cannot be managed or locked inboxes. Time is the sand slipping away from us until we realize this. Until we stop and start to focus on what time was. In remembering, we lock bits of time into cells in our brains. We store that moment as if a movie. Sometimes we can recall that single grain of sand vividly. Sometimes we need the trigger of a photo.

Time is the one thing we all share, but the one thing we cannot share with another person directly.

(thank you to @CaroldDM for the inspiration that drove this time post!)

This work is Copyright DocAndersen. Any resemblance to people real or fictional in this piece is accidental (unless explicitly mentioned by name.)

never give my wife the camera.