1. “WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?” I asked. And the answer came: “Away.”
2. There’s really not much one can say about the passing of time, just as there is not much that can be said about falling in love or the taste of anything. They can only be experienced, not described. But oh! what an experience! we wouldn’t be fully human without it.
3. Two types of time there are: linear (future-to-present-to-past) and cyclical/anniversarial (round-and-round-and-round). Cyclical time is really spiral time; we commemorate the same events but reach a year older as we do so. Both can seem terribly odd when we think about them, since from our perspective (the eternal “now”) we seem to be standing still. And yet… children grow up to have their own children; comic book pages turn yellow; hair greys and faces wrinkle; pop culture mutates into unfamiliarity; the soundtrack of our youth eventually plays on an oldies station. And as my BFF points out, even the passing of linear time varies depending on whether we’re at the DMV or watching Star Wars for the first time. (Einstein, and all that scat.)
4. One of the more interesting and beneficial aspects of time is the slow accumulation of what some call “wisdom.” We get less rattled by some things, if we’ve been through them before and know we’ll survive. We also become more skeptical of fads and fashions, since we’ve seen so many of them. Even at my age (56 at this writing) I’ve lived through several iterations of “Punk Is Dead,” “(noun) Of The Century,” and “Never Again.”
5. With the passing of time comes the blunting of memory, which is likely why time capsules are such a Thing. Today’s fad will be one of tomorrow’s artifacts. What’s yours?