If you are an avid fan of the TV game show "Jeopardy", then you understand the word "Take" in quotation marks means the word "Take" will appear in the correct response to the answer (Jeopard gives you the answer, the contestant must provide the question). If you're not a fan of "Jeopardy", then just walk with me. It will all make sense after while.
We've all heard the ancient and overused adage "Take your time". As a child, I used to eat very fast. My parents told me I ate like a prisoner! The nerve! (Unfortunately, it's a habit I still have to this day). For that reason, they told me "Take your time eating, son." If you are a fan of The S.O.S. Band, like I am, they have a song called "Take Your Time". The whole point of taking your time is so that you can maximize the experience or optimize every opportunity by paying attention to quality over quickness.It's very sound advice but my question is this, is the focus of the phrase more on "Taking" or "Timing?"
After all, What is time? How do you define time? Can you really "tell" time? How do you "take" it? Can you touch it or see it? Can you buy it or manipulate it? Now when I asked what is is time, and can you tell time, If you thought of a clock, you're DEAD WRONG!! GET A CLOCK OUT OF YOUR MIND! A clock has about as much to do with time as a politician has to do with telling the truth. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING squared!!A clock can inform you of a unit or measure of man's system of timING but a clock doesn't tell time. See, we understand time in units. Millennia, centuries, generations, years, days, minutes, seconds even a "jiffy" are all examples of units of time. If you're geologically inclined, and eon or an era, also qualify as units of time.
Those units give us a system of order and classification of time. They can also give us a rough estimate of about when entropy will take its effects on us and everything around us. We'll talk about entropy a little later.
We have been taught to fear time, grow impatient with time, beat time, be ON time but most of us STILL don't know what time is!
Every time you gaze into the night sky, you're seeing time passed. If you reach out and grasp, what we may call, "thin air", you just warped space-time around you. Have you ever sensed that someone behind you was staring at you? If so, you just intercepted a mental Instant Message traveling at warp speed through space-time. If you've ever jumped as high as you could and you came back down to the ground just as fast as you jumped, you experience time's adherence to universal laws.
You see, it has NOTHING to do with a clock, and everything to do with understanding! In our next edition, I will uncover the mysterious identity of time and show you how you can take it! Stay tuned... Until next "Time..."
