By James W. Dolan
Special to the Reporter
As I get older, I’ve been thinking about time: When it begins, when it ends, how we depend on it, and where it goes when it runs out. Instead of “what time is it?” I ask myself, “What is time?” I know it’s for the living; it begins with birth and ends with death. It’s how we measure things but does it have any meaning beyond human existence?
Eternity is a concept that exists outside of time without limitations. It cannot be measured or quantified because it always was and always will be. Like our notion of God, it exists with no beginning and no end. As humans, we are totally dependent on time. We capture it, measure it, slice it and dice it, adapt to it, waste it, and save it, But we cannot control it. Without time, we would be lost in space with no frame of reference. There would be no now and then, no history and no future.
We carve it into hours, days, months, years, decades, and centuries to better understand who and where we are. It can be good or bad, long or short, happy or sad, exciting or boring. We can take time off or a time out. Our lives are ordered by it. We plan, schedule, celebrate, mourn, mature, live, and die in time. We sing about it, explore it, name publications after it, fear its passage, work and play in it. We have deadlines at work and in sports “timeouts” and “overtimes,” but cannot to stop it.
We’re always spending time without considering it as a finite resource. Each of us only has so much of it. Time spent is lost forever – never to be revisited. The clock ticks louder with each passing year as our supply diminishes. We’re reluctant to give it up, but most of us would prefer not to live forever as human beings.
In Florida, I see retired executives walking the beach with metal detectors. They think they are looking for coins, but they’re really trying to find a purpose at a stage in life with no schedules or appointments. Time weighs heavy when there is nothing to measure. Death could be defined as the absence of time.
Remember the old saw: “Is there a noise when a tree falls in the forest if nobody’s there to hear it?” A variation would be: “Is there a ‘when’ if a tree falls in the forest and nobody exists?”
When did time begin? Was it the first thing God made at the threshold of creation? Or, did it begin with the first creatures at the start of evolution?
I would not want to live forever in time. One thing that would make eternity bearable is the absence of time. Existence in a form beyond time for a human is almost inconceivable, but perhaps it occurs in what is thought of as heaven. Oblivion (non-existence) seems a comfortable alternative as one wrestles with life after death in some form.
Who knows, maybe something transcends time beyond our capacity to imagine, let alone understand. I prefer to hope that whatever power is responsible for our existence in time can sustain it in some form thereafter. Only time will tell!
* Definition courtesy of Aristotle (circa 384 BC – 322 BC)
James W. Dolan is a retired Dorchester District Court judge who now practices law.
