What time is it?

By Dan Barber

What time is it... a simple question but with many answers. When I was a child and my Mom would tell be to get up out of bed and get ready for school, I might have been prompted to sleepily ask… “What time is it? She would respond, “It’s time for you to get your butt out of bed!”

Time is very important in our lives because we have a time when we are born, a time when we live, and a time when we die. Time itself may be eternal, or maybe not. The experts say that everything will end one day, but no one will be around to witness it. We weren’t around when time began, and I agree with the experts we won’t be around when the giant clock of space stops running.

I live in the desert and believe that the longer one lives in the desert the easier it is to be entertained, probably because there aren’t as many distractions out here as there are in a city.  I can sit in the shade for long times watching lizards do pushups on a hot rock. I can also stare at a huge granite boulder and wonder if it looked the same a couple of hundred years ago and will it look the same two hundred years into the future… when a giant boulder out here split in half a few years ago it was big news… at least to us here in the desert.

We have some of the cleanest air in Southern California and the night skies are light-pollution free, so I can stare off into space at night and wonder how small and insignificant we all are. When all is done and the grand ticking of our universal clock ceases the human existence will only have lasted for a fraction of a second… hopefully we will have left our mark by understanding and appreciating the time we’ve spent travelling through life, space and time.

Many philosophers in our history have sat and pondered the meaning of a lot of stuff, time being just one of the subjects. When I sit around pondering and enjoying stuff like hearing the laughter of my grandchildren playing, a clean blue sky or the antics of a desert lizard, some might think that I am just wasting my time… I don’t agree, I think that I’m enjoying my precious time because one day none of us will have any of it left.