mde
Time. It’s the most valuable commodity we have. More precious than U.S. dollars, African diamonds, and Siberian caviar. More precious even than beauty, or sleep, or love, or dreams. For, without time, none of these desirable things—and a million other desirable things, besides—could possibly exist. Naturally, there’s never enough of it to go around, and we all want more of it.
It’s just a myth that time is something that cannot be bought. It absolutely can. (As much as some of us might wish to believe otherwise, because the thought attributes a certain satisfying fairness to the universe.) There is a direct correlation between material and social affluence and longevity. Access to better quality health care, better food, better schools, better job prospects, safer neighbourhoods. On average, if you are relatively well-heeled your days will be more pleasant and there will be more of them to enjoy. Once again, the rich get richer.
Still, nothing is ever guaranteed to be so. People who seem to want for nothing frequently choke on their silver spoons or fall from penthouse balconies. Others, the seemingly unlucky ones, can thrive despite the direst of odds, and end up living long, long, lovely lives.
Kids, I think, are the ones who have the healthiest relationship to time. After all, they have vaults full of it, or at least go about their lives based on the core belief that they do. Children are the billionaires of time, carrying about thick bankrolls of hours, days, weeks, and years, peeling them off like little tycoons. The hours of their days are kept track of with Daliesque clocks, melting and malleable. Time enough to burn it up like marshmallows on a bonfire branch, fritter it away like dandelion fluff. After all, when you’re young, several lifetimes can be lived in one summer, or possibly before lunch. Time enough in a single day to be a pop star or an astronaut, explore the Amazon, hunt a tiger, escape a monster, cross an ocean, and fall in love.
It’s often hard for us older ones to wrap our heads around the fact that we will never be that rich again. One thing we can do is try to slow the passing hours down by stuffing them as full as possible. Squeeze in a fifteen-minute run before work, a quick swim at lunch, a pottery class in the evening. But this can just make the chronological units feel bloated and tired.
Or else we can keep track of the passing time with watchful and miserly eyes. But it’s a strange fact that the more observant we are of this rare and precious thing, the more enslaved we become to its fleeting beauty, and the quicker it seems to dwindle.
Like love, no one really knows how to make the hours stay. So perhaps we should just waste them as though we have an endless supply. Three hours lingering over breakfast in bed. Sitting in a movie theatre at three in the afternoon. A few stolen hours after midnight, smoking cigarettes and identifying constellations. There are so many things that are worth the cost.
