Time, as we know, is a man made construct. It does not actually exist. Still, nearly every human being adheres to the fictitious belief in it. They live their lives based upon it. They even judge themselves according to their “age”. The month of November has come and almost gone. It feels as though time marches faster, the older I get; but when I was a child, a day at school could seem like an eternity. When I was an adolescent, I felt the day would never come, when I would graduate high school.
I have not worn a watch since the early 1990’s. I rarely even look at a clock because I am a pretty good judge of time without one. Daylight Savings time, which I strongly dislike, does throw me off for a while. Night time is a different story. I often wake, or am awakened, during the middle of the night. On a couple of occasions, when the electricity had gone out, I was distraught because my clock was without power. It has a backup battery, but I had failed to replace it. I, too, suffer from the addiction to time when it is the middle of the night. I need to see the display on my clock so that I know how much sleep I am getting – or losing, whichever the case may be.
For centuries, human beings lived without our modern conveniences. They woke up with the sun and went to bed when it became dark. A greater percent of their lives was spent out of doors where they could maneuver through their day by the position of the sun. How different would our lives be if it was the quality of our work that truly mattered, rather than the minutes on a clock? We have seen how hard ants work carrying items twice their size back to their nest and worker bees as they gather pollen to take back to their hive. I doubt these hard working insects have any sort of time pieces to compel them to work. They know that working together as a team ensures their survival. If we all gave our best each day to the task at hand, unimpeded by time constraints, our own species might come to appreciate work as a kind of enjoyment, rather than a means to an end. Instead of working to make money to pay bills and buy more useless stuff, we could live and work in the moment. We could be happy now instead of postponing it until payday.
