A Little Time

Time.

It moves on, doesn’t it? Regardless of how bravely we try to hold it tight, right where it is, our feeble phalanges are no match for its step, step, step. Tick, tick, tock. It marches out its own pace.

I am particularly fond of ideas around the passing of time. Its relative nature. The way it speeds up when I watch the orange-gold sun setting over Noosa River reflected in the bubbles of my Prosecco, the beams bursting them with glee before I can let them dance lightly on my tongue. The way it slows down when I stare into the eyes of my children, even as I feel the wind of the minutes and years whooshing by.

I once read a book about the plasticity of time. The way it can bend, change and morph. I am enamoured of the idea that we have created an arbitrary way of counting parcels of memories from before, and experiences yet to be, and yet time pays our accounting no mind at all. It just keeps stepping forward. The road going ‘ever on’, whether we tramp with the sturdy thud of the dwarves, or frisk with the fleet and nimble glancing of the elves.

Time carves grooves in our skin-faces and cliff-faces. It takes people from us, and gives us others. It offers us the choice to reflect or hide. Look forward or back. It even allows us to be in a moment. FOR a moment. And with a moment.

And at the precise second that we become aware of it, it is gone. Skittering away. Resuming its rhythm.

We measure our time by minutes or moments, or Playstation games. As is the way of all things, even Sony products will eventually break down: Singstar will be rendered unreachable, and the nights I spent learning a duet with my friend will exist only in the shifting landscape of my long-term memory. We will still sing together, the words to “A Little Time” are etched deeper, deeper than a technological obsolescence can erase, and yet I will feel an uncomfortable sense of loss in retiring the game for all. I will know that time has closed that frequency down.

Some days, we all want time to stop, stay as it is, move faster, move on, pass by. Some days we want time to heal us and we grow impatient with it. Some days we want it to halt.

Most days, we all just want a little time.

…From The Ashers xxx