Time and Change

The Very Essence of Living

Time is marked by changes. Change does not occur without time, and time would be meaningless without change. The hands on a clock sweep past the numbers on its face. We watch the change. We say that time is moving, but it is the hands of the clock that we see moving, not time.

Imagine yourself in some isolated valley among the mountains. Every day, day after day, you sit in this valley; no television, no radio, no visitors, no change. There is only the sun and moon above. You could think back to when the moon was full, or to when the sun was first visible, but over the span of minutes and seconds, there is no visible change. Without change, time is seen as moving very slowly.

Now, for a moment, imagine yourself in deep space. Image beyond the planets, and stars, and galaxies, beyond the edges of the universe. From where you are, there is not a single pin hole of light, nothing but darkness. Day after day, year upon year, eons and eons, only darkness.

Now imagine a change. A single point of light, so tiny you have to squint to even see it. Now you have a reference point, a single point in space and time. Everything you experience occured either before or after the appearance of this time point of light. And any direction you would turn, would be toward it, away from it, or at some angle to it. Add one more point, and you can then measure everthing in time and space. The time between A and B is now a unit of time. And everthing that occurs will be so many whole and so many portions of this A/B time period. And the same is true in space. The angle between A and B, the perceived distance from where you are, can be used a as a measure for anything else that appears in the deepness of space. Everything will be so many measures and fractions of that initial distance.

We read "In the beginning, God created..." but perhaps God is many thousands of times older than the span of all time between the first particle in the universe and today. And, no doubt He many thousands of times times more vast than the span of all the universe from the fartest spec on one side the the last glimmer of light on the other. And what does it matter if God is a thousand times older than the universe or only twice as old as the universe. Before there was a universe, before there was a star, or even a grain of dust, there was nothing, nothing anywhere, in all the empty caverns of space, beyond the fathest reaches of all imagination, nothing. Not a single spec to measure time, to measure distance, nothing. The universe was vast, and void, and empty, and pure, and perfect. Until there was a change, there was no way of measuring anything, time or space. Before the first change, there was only God in the universe. Time accompanies change, and it is by measuring the changes, that we measure time and space.

That holds true for our personal lives as much as it does for the entire universe. Without the variety of an occasional change, for good or for bad, to our otherwise routine, predictable lives, we have no way of distinguishing last week from last year. The more change we can squeeze into our lives, the more variety, stimulation, excitement and time we have created for ourselves here on earth. Even in lives of constant excitement, where there is never two moments alike, time gets blurred without the occasional moments of quiet retreat. All lives need change, not change in partner, but a change of scenery, the occasional memorable event, time sitting under the tree, listening to the leaves rustling, unless you do that all the time, then you need something else unique to your life.

Whenever life becomes too predictable, boring, that is the time to restore the color into your life. Take control. Add the subtle change now and then. A different route to work, a rearranged desk, new clothes, even calling up an old friend, whatever. The point is, without some variety to mark the passing of your time, you wind up years down the road wondering where the time went. Rest Homes are filled with people who have no clue how long it has been since a child visited. Since nothing else happened worth remembering, the visit could have been a week or several years. Without the occasional event to mark the passage of time, it is all a blur. We all need to know how long it's been since yesterday, so when we ready ourselves for tomorrow or next week, we'll know with confidence, how far away in time that is.

God has given us all the same amount of time in any given day, week, month. Having a full life starts with seizing the day, today. Take every day, and do something worth remembering. No matter how wonderful your life, without the surprise visit from an old friend, without the occasional rainshower, without the walk in the moonlight, that wonderfulness you experience is just same song over and over. You're not sqeezing fun into your life, you're squeezing your life into having fun, and it's just not fun over the the long run.

Variety is not just the spice of life, it is the very essence of living. Life is too short, and there is so much more you meant to do with your life than to do the same thing time and time again until you get board with it. Be what you were meant to be. Do what you were meant to do. Touch all the lives you were meant to touch. Take time for a friend. Tomorrow you'll have yesterday as a warm memory.