PASSING TIME

Sean was very young when he realized he could do strange things with no trouble at all. For instance he could make time go faster. All he had to do was close his eyes, concentrate very hard and think of something nice and before he knew it four o’ clock became five o’ clock, Tuesday became Wednesday, January became February and winter became spring. It was so easy in fact he could never tell what time it was from one minute to the next. He’d screw his eyes up tight, concentrate very hard and imagine what it would be like to be king of the whole wide world! Sure enough by the time he opened his eyes it was already May, then June, then August…

As he grew older he began to wonder if he could also make time go slower. He screwed his eyes up tight, concentrated very hard and tried to think of something not so nice. He concentrated on being miserable at the thought of having to think of something unpleasant for a while. But it didn’t work. By the time he opened his eyes it was already a few years later.

Perhaps if I thought of something positively nasty, he considered. So he imagined what it would be like never to be able to think of anything nice ever again… By now he was middle-aged and he’d forgotten what he used to think was so nice in the first place! But time just kept going faster and faster.

Sean tried again and again to remember what he used to think was something nice, in case he’d got it the wrong way round when he was younger. He imagined what it would be like to be king of the whole wide world! not very nice, he thought, too much to have to think about. He was beginning to think he prefer not to think at all. But no matter what time it was he couldn’t stop thinking. If he wasn’t thinking he was dreaming. If he wasn’t dreaming he was fast asleep. If he wasn’t fast asleep he was worrying what on earth would happen next!?

As the years positively flew past Sean grew more and more convinced he’d been wrong all the time. He could never really make time do what he wanted it to, nobody could, he’d imagined it all. Of course he was very disappointed. And the more disappointed he felt the slower time seemed to go, it seemed to drag on for years. Till one day it stopped altogether. Sean realized there was nothing left to think about and even if there was there was no time left to do it in. He screwed his eyes up tight, concentrated very hard and tried to imagine he was still alive…

********* When I was a young boy, my Uncle Alan alerted me to the acceleration of time passing as one grew older. At the time Xmas seemed like an eternity away. Now it seems like but a blip on a radar-screen scanning me to my final blip-blop-glockenstop, which will come sooner than I imagined. An imaginary death that will blow my mind into utter timelessness. I no longer count the days I imagine the lifetimes. No longer a privilege to waste time, time’s privilege to waste me, should I choose to consider my particular existence a waste of time or a privilege in and of itself. The future is the past and the present is a gift at some point we’ll need to give back to whoever or whatever gave it to us in the first place. To what purpose I can only imagine. But I do believe if something or somebody is gone forever they do need to be gone for good. And let the truth always be somebody else’s fiction.