For those of you who haven’t heard, the fact that you’re reading this should be evidence of the fact that I am not dead, yet. Of course, I could have written this before my heart intervention, but I didn’t.
As some of you already know, my cardiologist placed two stents in a couple very naughty arteries. The upshot, as Laura is tired of hearing, I now receive transmission from 108 cable stations. It’s a technological miracle. And because of that miracle, I have, invariably, been granted more time.
Now, there’s an interesting concept, more time. It sounds a bit like the notion of spare change.
Back in the Two Thousand-ies, I developed a book concept I was very eager to write, but never got the chance to do so. It was called, Agreed-upon Lies. It was of course, said with a wink and a poke. What I hadn’t figured was how upset the idea would make people.
Back in the Two Thousand-ies, I developed a book concept I was very eager to write, but never got the chance to do so. It was called, Agreed-upon Lies. It was of course, said with a wink and a poke. What I hadn’t figured was how upset the idea would make people.
I was once screamed at while presenting this notion at a conference, by a high-ranking fellow in British Military Intelligence. He was decrying that I had some nerve even broaching the topic. Of, course, he was military intelligence, and it was at an academic conference, two places where the practice of “I’ll believe your lies if you’ll believe mine” have been in active practice since the time of the Romans. I think the Greeks wanted to believe differently, and even though I am a Romantic at heart. At some level, the Greeks seemed to really want to find the “truth.”
But this essay isn’t about truth, it’s about time, which even Albert Einstein referred to it as nothing more than a construct of the human mind.
So, it turns out, time is one of those pesky agreed-upon lies that appears necessary, if for no other reason, than to make sure freeway traffic knows when to jam. It’s also insidious, because time ties us to external, human-constructed frames of perceptions that continually force us into making rotten compromises based on self-imposed artificial limitations. It is our vain attempt to impose our will and control the moment. So, how do we negotiate the travails of timeliness to get more time without being forced into the realm of the rotten?
To find that answer, I began rummaging through the Internet, as it was back in the two thousand-ies, searching for the one person I thought would be the best arbiter of time in the United States. I found Tom O’Brian, who, at the time, was Chief of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division, located in Boulder, Colorado.
After numerous emails back and forth, my conversation with Mr. O’Brian was arranged, and true to some absurdist point in the space-time continuum, he was 45 minutes late. He did have an excuse. It happened to be the day before a momentous time event. O’Brian and his colleagues were on the verge of adding a leap second to the world’s official timing devises, and reporters from all over the country were looking to O’Brian for some pithy and, of course, timely quote.
According to Mr. O’Brian’s description, he headed the division that was responsible for realizing the official time for the US. That included both the time of day, and how long one second was. He assured me that was a crucial part of time keeping. His division also distributed very accurate timing and frequency information, which, as he explained “is sort of the inverse of time — how many ticks there are in a second – that’s what frequency is. We distribute that information in many different ways, over radio broadcast, satellite broadcast, across the Internet, and by telephone. This is maintained for everything from the most demanding scientific and industrial uses to the needs of the general public. We also do research on the new kinds of atomic clocks and the ways to distribute time and frequency.”
“So, I guess that means you know a little bit about keeping time?”
To his credit O’Brian responded with a laugh and said, “I hope so.”
It was the nature of his “hope” reply and his sense that the world was not always as it presented itself to be, that told me he, better than anyone, understood the futility of his time spent. I asked him about the big bang and the beginning of time, and as if on cue, he set the stage for what would follow.
“You’re asking a very interesting philosophical question. Does time have a beginning and an end, and where does it come from?
Does time have a beginning and an end, and where does it come from?
It’s paradoxical that time is the single quantity we can measure better than any other quantity, thousands to billions of times better than anything else, and it’s probably the thing we understand the least. I’m not trying to avoid your question, it’s just that there’s really not a clear answer to it. A lot of people believe that time and space began in some kind of singular event like the big bang, but not everyone believes that. Some people believe in a continuous or steady state universe in which time and space and matter have existed forever and will exist forever. Some believe in a sort of oscillating universe in which it appears that our universe is going through some cycles over and over again, and some people believe we’re just one manifestation of maybe an infinite number of parallel universes. My job, fortunately, is the easy part, not to figure out where it all came from, but to measure time as accurately as possible.”
Here was someone dedicated to living in perfect harmony with an agreed upon lie and his job was to make sure the lie was as accurate as possible. This was tacit agreement in maintaining something that didn’t really exist, and was based only on our perception, and yet without this perception many of our most important and cherished life activities would be impossible.
We do lots of things in the name of time.
We spend time.
We waste time.
We wait for the right time.
We allow time.
We keep time.
We calculate time.
We make time.
We find time.
We run out of time.
We play for time.
We take our time
We do time.
We lose time.
We kill time.
But according to O’Brian, and Einstein, for that matter, “While time and space are the ways we experience the world, they are not reality.”
In querying O’Brian further, I decided not to waste our time. “If time leads to disorder and starts from disorder, isn’t it more or less a false attempt to find order in a universe that isn’t ordered?
O’Brian responded with a joy that led me to believe that this was the best time he’d spent in a conversation about time on this day when everyone wanted to know about a leap second that it was obvious was more a thing of our imagination than anything else. “Well, that’s a very interesting philosophical question. My feeling is, and it’s just a feeling, I tend to agree with my characteristic of Einstein’s, ‘as human beings we have tremendous limits on how we can perceive and understand the universe,’ and I suspect our perception of time is one of those limits.”
So, what seems clear, the notion of more time simply doesn’t really exist.
So, what seems clear, the notion of more time simply doesn’t really exist. And while this timeless digression with Mr. O’Brian was one of my favorite interviews as a journalist, I don’t think it was a waste of time, but rather a genuine part of the inseparable continuum many of us seek more of, right or wrong, true or false, real or Memorex.
The one thing I can safely say, is I am not dead, yet, which means there will still be time to write these gentle observations of a life led and to record them for the time being. Now, of course, that my clock has been reset.
Was this exploration indulgent? By all means, but then we could say the same thing about the time spent watching March Madness or the Super Bowl. Shakespeare understood the essence of how we consume our time. He summed it up in a single title: Much Ado about Nothing.
Here is brief poem about Time and Space:
This
is time
And this is space
Robert Benchley set us all straight
The arrow pointing in one direction
My heart now newly reopened
The world fragrant springed and spronged
The space for simple gratitude before me
The time for love beyond the brevity of years