Of course many things matter, depending on circumstances. However, that which ultimately matters most for those who want to live life to the fullest is, too often, out of mind. That, of course, is time.
Aaron Fodiman suggests that time is a great healer but a poor beautician. While true, that is not quite time’s most consequential trademark.
Time has been identified as the real culprit in countless fatalities. Just the other day, The Onion broke the story that Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas died in his home of an apparent age overdose at 103, explaining that his body simply couldn’t handle the sheer quantity of years he had put into his system. Apparently, Mr. Douglas had struggled with a dark history of maturation that few of his friends or admirers were brave enough to confront him about. The Onion account noted that due to the passage of time, family members had noticed his body’s slow deterioration, observing that he developed the telltale liver spots, gray hair, and gaunt face that so many of the elderly display.
While Mr. Douglas and most others throughout the county know full well the risks of time, they press on and on and on, perhaps hoping that somehow time will not catch up with them.
The Onion scientists expressed the hope that this tragedy would serve as a cautionary tale, and warned anyone with an octogenarian in their family to seek help before it was too late.
So, be warned and take heed: What we do with our time matters a great deal, far more than access to medical wonders and even more than a REAL wellness mindset and lifestyle.
Of course, all the preceding material was written in good fun, inspired by the irreverent humorists at The Onion. Time, however, is a serious matter and a phenomenon that has occupied great thinkers from the beginning, not of time but of the much more limited period when humans as we know them (i.e., us) developed the capacity and, of course, the time, to ponder the nature of time. This subject has long been featured in philosophy, and more so than ever since the 20th Century. There are even categories for schools of thought about time, including Fatalism; Reductionism and Platonism, the topology of time, the arguments about time named after one McTaggart, an A and Theory of time and B and Presentism, Eternalism and the Growing Universe Theory of time. Whew — it’s enough to make your head spin and, in my case, enough to cause sleepiness whenever I try to make heads of all these theories.
I hope reading this essay has been worth your time. If not, just forget it. It’s now in the past and there’s no going back.
On the other hand, if it does prove worthwhile, send me some love. Or more time, if you have some to spare.
