Thursday 15 February 2001

Pic of the day: Archive photo from my west coast trip last fall. I remember often playing along this stream, especially in summer when it was smaller. Eons, or moments, ago. So little has changed, except me.

Buying time

As I changed the backup tape at work, I felt surprised that it was already Thursday. It's not like I didn't know it, but it was still strange to see. And stranger still because of yesterday.

Yesterday I thought to call my best friend, as I've done before on Valentine day. But before I got that far, I remembered that I had just called a couple weeks ago. The way she experiences time, that's just the other day ... time flies, or so she said last I talked with her. A couple weeks ago. A long, long time ago. I know logically that it's just recently, but it feels like a vast gulf of time. I can't say that anything particular has happened in the meantime ... but it still feels like it must be months ago.

Anyway, I didn't call her. I sent her a Valentine card from the BreakUpGirl website. Now that's bound to make her wonder, when she eventually checks her mail. Heh. I just love BreakUpGirl. The website, that is! :)

As I sat down to write all this, I had the radio news on. They interviewed the wife of a missionary who had been arrested in Nepal and had been in prison for three months. He's coming home now. "It's been many months ... no, not many" she corrected herself. But of course the first was right, coming from the heart. Three months are a lot of months, worrying about someone you love but cannot reach. Or so I would imagine.

***

If you could buy time in a shop; if you could carry it with you until you could use it ... how much would you be willing to give for it? How much of it would you buy? What would you use it for?

These strange questions floated around in my head this morning. It would make for a great SF story, I'm sure. But in practice, we make this kind of decision regularly. When I decline to work overtime, I set a price on my time. I could get some tens of dollar for each hour, but I don't. Conversely, when I go to work in the first instance, I sell my time for money.

People put different value on their time. In part this is decided by the market - some people's time is simply in more demand. They are paid more. Someone mentioned a couple years ago that if Bill Gates were to stop and pick up a $1000 bill, he'd lose money. This is hardly the case for most of us. Our time is frankly not in very high demand, unless it is free. In which case there is no end to the things that should be done. Cfr "Itland's Law": There is no unemployment for those who work for free.

***

Perhaps I should put Itland's Law to the test by offering some kind of free service on the Net and see what happened. Like free Tarot readings or some such. Heh. Just kidding. I've looked at Tarot again recently, not quite sure why. A few years ago, when a young friend of mine had just died, I tried Tarot divination. The problem is that it seemed to work. Of course I stopped at once. You don't want magic that actually works. Magic is best kept in fantasy books.

As a child, I read a book by a Norwegian missionary. For some reason she mentioned her dislike of playing cards. At one point, she told, she had suddenly felt compelled to say: "It was the playing-cards that helped Noah build the ark too, but themselves they were not allowed to enter." Now that was a strange statement, and she admitted in the book that she did not know what it meant. Years later, I found out that our common playing cards are derived from the Tarot, or the other way around. There seems to be a deeper rivalry between religion and cards than the current concerns about playing for money ...

Anyway, my friend died 6 years ago. I remember writing about this and the Tarot thing too in my online diary. Except that I did not start my online diary until more than three years later, in summer 1998. This means that yes, I have a pretty clear memory of something that did not happen. I'm not sure that is a good thing. Most likely I wrote about the event in my offline (but still computer-based) diary. Still, it's kind of worrying that I was about to try to link to that entry, before it dawned on me that it was about five years ago and long before this journal at all. Time is sure a slippery thing to grasp!

***

Wouldn't it be nice if we could put time in the bank when we were children and take it out (preferably with compound interest) when we grow old?

Do you remember as a child, being bored? The hours were so long then, interminable stretches of time waiting for something to happen. We thought that life was something that happened to us. And when nothing happened, we were bored. How we wished we could have just skipped the time until the next main event ... "Are we there yet?" "When is it?" "Why doesn't anything ever happen?"

And then we grow old - or perhaps not - and suddenly the finishing line is ahead. Somewhere along the road we learned that life isn't something the world does to us, it is something we do to the world. But now there is so little time. The harder we close our hands around the sands of time, the faster they run out between our fingers. How we wish that we had those hours of quiet, those long days of nothing important, of just being young and alive and full of restless energy.

And we, who once killed time, not knowing that it was our life ... now we say like Goethe's Faust, to the moment: Verweile doch, du bist so schön! - Please stay, you are so beautiful! And then it's over.