Tracking time is so precise these days, everything synchronized to nanoseconds, that I fear we are losing the feeling for time. Ask a young person what time it is and you get an answer like 11:14. Fine, but why so precise? What’s wrong with quarter past? If you want to meet them at “half-past”, you’d better say 11:29; broad terms like “quarter ’til” and “ten after” only have meaning to “clock generations”. There seems to be no feel for the passing of time.
The digital era has brought precision, but destroyed the visual aspect of time. There is no feeling associated with wasting time if you can’t see it, like watching sand fall through an hour glass or the monotonous circling of a clock’s second hand. The big round school clocks dared you to see the hands move (A watched pot never boils), but the hands moved at their own pace regardless of your anxiety, action or inaction. Time marches on.
Ironically, present-day lives are so busy that daily activities are packed neatly into modules of time, allowing movement from one module to the next, like programmed robots, without the need for clocks. We are busier with more ways to spend time each day, yet there are no clocks to show us that time is passing … only digital readouts that tell us what time it IS. Where has the time gone?
Thought for the Day: Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. Theophrastus (372 BC – 287 BC)
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