How do you battle the beast of time?

There is nothing particularly Southern in this post, although Southerners are as boxed in by this concept as folks from Up North or Out West. It regulates our existences. It marks where we are, have been, and will be. It might even determine who we are if we allow it that much power.

Time.

Deb and I have a calendar on a shelf in our great room. It has metal rectangles for every day, date, and month. We follow the passage of time in 24-hour increments. There is a minor ritual, usually in the early morning as one of us interrupts our coffee drinking, in which the proper metal rectangles are put in place. What happens when you do that daily ritual? The rush of time becomes apparent. The recent transition to August replaces the one for July, which takes the place of June, which seems as if it was only yesterday. 2018 becomes the latest little box in which we exist, just as 2017 is, and 1992, 1976, and so on. Time is no longer a tame friend but a relentless orderer of things, even a taskmaster when it presses against personal preferences.

It would seem that becoming an author would take away much of the harsh nature of deadlines, which were a daunting fixture of my journalism career. It does, to a degree. There still is the foundational notion of AIC. That is Ass In Chair, which is the mantra given to aspiring writers that finishing a novel means spending time in a chair at a keyboard. The difference is that you determine your time schedule. There is no list of stories handed out to make sure you meet this deadline and that one. You are in control, but only to a degree.

Here's an interesting thought. What if time is only a concept, and we give it power only by faith? I have wondered about the power of faith in capitalism, how putting a 20 sign in the upper corners of a piece of paper make it 20 times more valuable than the piece of paper with a 1 in the upper corners. That piece of paper has no intrinsic value. It has value only because of the faith we put in it, and the shared faith of those who accept those pieces of paper. The faith aspect is carried on when we replace paper with plastic. There are embedded little facts in that plastic, and the vendor accepts those because he or she has faith that the transaction machine proves the buyer (me) has the required financial power.

We Western folks regard time in a linear manner. We are created, born, live, work, love, die (the ultimate deadline). Individual lives in the Western concept are bordered by birth and death, just as a journalism work shift is bordered by arrival and leaving. What if we saw time differently, or not at all? Imagine you are a point in the middle of concentric circles. Those circles are the persons in your life, your place, the daily weather, the immediate needs of you and others. There is no linear reality with borders or deadlines. It simply is, and you travel within this other reality.

I like that idea. Makes my life easier. Oh yes, we flip those rectangles to make sure that the start of a new day or new month is marked. I will write out payments for bills that have a due date. I will fulfill my AIC requirement. In fact, I have to go do that now. I have a personal deadline to meet. Quite a linear existence. Can't escape it. Faith in action.

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