“Life is not a `brief candle.' It is a splendid torch
that I want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” - Bernard Shaw -
Time is a key ingredient in our industry. Even the argument about our name is about time.
On one hand there is ‘timeshare’ which generally marks time in seven-day increments or intervals. On the other
hand is ‘vacation ownership’ whose primary arguments are that it is two words rather than one and it is more than
just time. The truth is that it’s very hard to get our arms around time. First we see it as one thing... like the
‘Long Gray Line’ of cadets at West Point, it marches on, then we see it as the preverbal ‘Hour Glass’ containing
the sands of time and watch with fascination as it runs out. Sometimes it appears to us as the ‘Gaggle of Geese’
flying south and at others as proof of a supposition, it will tell. There are times when we ‘mark’ it, ‘kill’ it,
‘waste’ it and wonder ‘where did it go’. We attempt to ‘manage it’, ‘save’ it, and let it ‘heal’.
It was Thomas Mann
who said: “Time has no division to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of
a new year. It is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols”, yet we use all sorts of things to ‘tell
it’. There are clocks, watches, dials, and church bells. We even have time clocks which mark our coming and going
on the job and time clocks which control the duration of sporting events- except sometimes they go into overtime.
At basketball games there are timekeepers that control the time and in hockey games they even have penalty ones
that mark the duration in the box. There is the biological clock, which ladies pay more attention to than do gentlemen.
There are tee times and checkout times. In track & field and swimming there are world record times young athletes
attempt to break.
There are many other things that we use to mark times passage and many are in the form of celebrations.
These typically are specific dates such as birthdays, graduation days, wedding days, and holidays. There are dates
that we remember for other reasons such as December 7th, November 22 or 9/11. There are occasions when there is
never ‘enough’ and others when we let it ‘slip through our hands’, when it’s time ‘to go’ or ‘change’, ‘stay’,
‘remember’ or ‘forget.’
In framing the constitution our Founding Fathers declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal..." That's how it was written for immortal consecration on that sweltering Philadelphia
day in July of 1776. We've heard that line so many times since we were children. The obvious omission of course,
is that women were left out. And in actual practice, blacks, Native Americans, and other ethnic minorities were
also excluded. If equality is to be actually found it will not be in the writing by these propertied white males.
True equality only exists on this earth in one form. It exists in that form for every living thing in exact
equal proportions and it will continue so as long as life (in any form) on this earth lasts. Regardless of
your belief about creation (be it by God or a big bang) our lives revolve around the 24 hours we consider a day.
Those 24 hours are exactly the same for every living thing. What we do within that time cycle is what makes our
lives what they are. Often we think of that cycle in 8-hour increments 1] work, 2] sleep, and 3] play. Each of
those hours, those increments of time, could be a ‘first’ time or a ‘last’ time.
Perhaps the most difficult of all is the “last” time. One of Garth Brooks' first major hits was a tune
titled ‘If tomorrow never comes’. This line begs the question: “How important would today’s 24 hours be if
they were the last 24 hours?" If we knew these were our last hours we would surely come closer to understanding
that the real value of a day will only be found in the living of it, in the weaving the fabric that makes up our
life, every day, each hour and every moment.
It was once said that: “Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and
may therefore be demanded back in any of the next hours.”
Final Thoughts
Each of us has exactly the same number of hours and minutes each day. It’s not like “points’ where if you don’t
have enough you can buy more. The challenge of inventing more has baffled scientists since the beginning and as
much as we all would like to, we can’t ‘bank’ some of today’s hours and spend them on another day. Time itself
has proven to be both fair and forgiving. We can waste some of today’s precious hours without penalty and can still
look forward to a full 24-hour day tomorrow. If success eluded us yesterday, what we do today may help us find
it tomorrow. However, we can never ‘find’ time for anything. If you want time you must ‘make’ it.
My Pop once told me that time ‘never stood still’ but that it did ‘stay long enough’, if I used it wisely. He
said that we would never have more time that we have and that we each have all the time there is. Pop had less
than 50 years here on this earth and after he was gone it occurred to me that what he meant was that we each have
our whole life and not one moment more. That our lives are not measured in the number of years but how we filled
each day. The measure of a man like my Pop? He lived his whole life doing what needed to be done each day and when
each day ended he faced the sunset feeling good about himself and what he had accomplished.
Time and time again, I stand at my sunsets and wonder… DID I?
