Only Time Can Tell

I dig in my pocket; looking for my cell phone - troubled because of my large gloves – I find it and I look at the little digital clock. My breath blows out small clouds, painted white by the coldness of the winter; clouds, which creates tiny dewdrops on the surface of the display. I wipe away the drops and then the numbers and the hands of the clock are revealed. 8.03. Damn it. Again I failed to manage it. I lost track of time.
Time goes. But where did it go? What happens when time goes? And where does it go? It goes to a place called ‘the past’. And the past is like a piece of silk, which softly is folded and put in a chest with a large padlock on. You cannot get the past back to the present. You can capture the present by using cameras and diaries, but they become past as soon as they are created. The past resists of memories, and once they have turned into memories, it is too late to correct.
This is also why it is a shame that people tend to live in the past and the future, instead of living in the moment now, and now, and now… The young girl is looking straight ahead at the other side of the road – that is her goal. She only has to take one step after another, and then she can manage to reach it. The girl is thinking about her goal, concentrates all her attention on the goal she will reach in her near future. But her focus should have been directed towards the car that hit her in her present. But who knew? Only time could tell.
People – especially youngsters – have a careless view on time. What does it mean to be 2 minutes late? What does simply 2 minutes mean? Well, they can for example be a matter of life or death. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can risk meeting death. But if only you had been there 2 minutes, well or just 2 seconds later, you would have been able to keep on living. 2 minutes are important. It is not acceptable to have a careless sight on time, when so many people have lost their loved ones because of time. Time is our worst enemy and our best friend. Time is always against us and always with us. Time is so ambiguous and yet so monotonous. You can’t put a finger on time. What is time? Imagine that you should explain ’time’ to a person who had never heard of the term. You could try with clocks, or an explanation with seconds and minutes – or you could resort to Jesus and the dinosaurs. But actually it is a quite impossible task to explain what time is, and yet we all know it.
My future reader might sit and eat dinner in the moment I am writing this. Or maybe this will be read in the future, and maybe that reader is doing something that not yet has been invented. In your present you sit and read this, but your present is right now my future.
Time waste; “It is a Waste of time”. How can you waste your time? If you don’t know how much time you have left – and you usually don’t – you can’t talk about time wasting, can you? And who decides which activities that qualifies itself to be worthy of time spending? Why are we busy? Can we manage what we want? Can we manage what we have to? Who controls the time? And is the time the same now as in different times? Is the time the same as in other countries?
The cancer patient is told that he has got about five months left to live. He is rewarded with five months, which he can use to bring everything into order. He is happy to get that time.
The defendant is told that he gets five months of prison. Time is here used as punishment. There are good times and bad times, time for release and for chains, for freedom and captivity.
Time lets you develop and it develops you. You grow older, things change – your body, your personality, your knowledge, your life experiences, your relations. The world around you, people, countries, the environment, and the norms – everything changes all the time and we rarely pay notice to it. What does it mean to me that time kills a person in Canada and gives life to another in Australia? It means nothing, until it comes close. Time takes its course and in does not mean anything to me. And then I ask myself why the sight on time is careless? I should know the answer. I do. Time is too big to accommodate. It contains an excessive amount of knowledge, changes, life and death. Nor can you accommodate the whole world. If everybody knew what happened in every little corner of the world they could not do anything but lie in the ground screaming. That is why we built a natural filter, so we can go through life without screaming all the time. That is why we are careless about time. That is why it is okay. Will I ever learn to control my time? Only time can tell.
New technologies are ten steps forward, but back eleven. Of course it is good for some things, but in the end it will only cause troubles. As Giddens said, we separate time and space by breaking the limit nature gives us. We do not have to travel a week on horse to tell your family in Jutland that you were going to get married. Now you can Skype them or call them. But is this new kind of communicating not a lot more cynical and cold. We let simple computers and phones take over the job of the heart and the gift of speaking. What is up with that? How will it end? Only time can tell.
Is this a good essay? Will I get praised or criticized? Only time can tell.