Watch The Time

What is the time? It's a common question from anyone who has forgotten their watch or lost track of the time and what they mean is, what is the time of day according to our standard way of measuring the time of day.Look deeper and ask yourself the same question and your brain will start bubbling. They say that time did not exist before the big bang so if time started then it must have started at zero. That will be midnight I assume? How convenient was that?

How do we know time started at midnight? We clearly don't and nor do we know what the time was for millions or billions of years. Time may be a natural process that continues whether we like it or not but the way we measure it is an entirely human construction.

There seems to be little reason to have sixty seconds in an minute or 24 hours in each day. We could split a day up into any number of different measurements and in a digital age you could argue that hours are pointless and we should simply have seconds in a day. What time is it? 64,327 seconds. I'm sure we would get used to it after a while.

It used to be that people would measure time by the seasons since that was the most important feature of their lives for growing the food they needed to survive. When the railways arrived the measurement of time became much more important and we had the station master with his pocket watch ensuring the trains left on time. Now we have atomic clocks which are far more accurate than our minds can comprehend and now we have to fit in with accurate clocks and try to be punctual to the second rather than arriving at approximately the right time. Time has changed from being our servant to now becoming our master.

Regardless of how we measure it our lives are limited. Whether you choose to count in seconds, minutes, hours or years our lives are passing by, moment by moment. You may be hoping to live for many years yet, and I hope you do, but none of us knows how long we have left. Time waits for no man and if you let it pass you by it is gone forever. So the maybe the question we should constantly be asking ourselves is, " Do you feel you have made the best use of your time today?"