The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. – Albert Einstein
by JayasankaranKK
If you think life is inherently fair, that what goes around will, indeed, come around, than this observation by Lucy, of Peanuts’ fame, is right:
“There must be one day above all others in each life that is the happiest.”
There’s only one problem with that and it’s obvious. “What if you’ve already had it?”
Alas, there’s the rub. There always is – in a world bordered by linear time.
When I was young, time was relative – it moved excruciatingly slowly during the school hours and fairly zipped through the holidays. I was right about it too because all my classmates agreed.
Then I hit adolescence and couldn’t wait to grow up and meet girls – somehow female classmates weren’t considered in that light. In my case, it was pretty much a constant preoccupation during my university days: I wasn’t successful at all but that, again, is another non-story. I have even rationalised it away: glory may be fleeting but obscurity is forever.
Ironically, I consider that time in the 70s to be among the happiest periods of my life. I’m not sure why but it may have to do with making friendships that have lasted decades, meeting the girl who became my wife, and growing up in an environment that asked nothing of you but to pass an annual examination.
You can have an awful amount of fun in between. There was but one rule: don’t put off till tomorrow what can be enjoyed today.
OK, it sounds like “the good, old days” syndrome and there are those who would say that the main reason for that tosh is a “bad memory.” But that’s the beauty of nostalgia: it softens the hard edges, the grimmer aspects of those days so no one’s the wiser.
Things keep moving though. Suddenly, you’re in your thirties and before you can yell Mahathir Mohamad, the years begin flashing past.
They should have warned us, all those years ago. That sometime in our 30s, the Great Programmer would quietly press fast forward on the cassette deck of the rest of our lives and we’d spend most of that time playing catch up.
And maybe we are playing catch-up if anyone remembers a 1960s cartoon series called The Jetsons.
It was about George Jetson and his family who lived in a future where space colonisation was a given: where capitalism and competition thrived in a future where man lived in aerial colonies.
Except for its flying cars, everything else on that 60-years-ago-show has come to pass: robot servants, talking video screens, mobile phones.
Surely flying cars and talking dogs can’t be far behind?
Nothing should surprise us where time is concerned. “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” Theat statement was uttered by Harry Fosdick, an English clergyman ahead of his time. He predicted it in the 1930s.
Where we’re concerned, we might as well take a leaf out of English comedian Benny Hill’s book: “Live each day as if it were your last…because one day, you’ll be right.”
WE