Is time on our side? A fun way to look at the past, present, and future
As a rather average Gent, I am pleased to say that I don’t have weighty responsibilities in life. This means that in my free time I do not have to do the things the Elite do—such as read the collected works of Max Weber or Oswald Spengler, review the figures for steel production in 1950s Romania, or prep to deliver the keynote address at the next large tech conference.
I consider myself lucky as I think that the people who are beavering away at their next brilliant TED lecture (which I will undoubtedly watch!) or penning a New York Times bestseller simply do not have the time to mentally drift from here to there to everywhere. Shame for them.
The truth be told, a good many of those who stand in the average ranks with me also like to daydream. We have found that mulling things over seems to be “our territory.” Our minds are uncluttered and our lives unhurried by those pressures that plague the great and the good.
What then do I daydream about? Well, the nature of time for one and its unusual characteristic of being both fixed and fluid. Fixed in that it rhythmically ticks away second by second and is then gone forever. Yet it is also fluid in that it can pass both quickly or excruciatingly slowly. We just can’t put our finger on it and that is what makes it so interesting.
I think of the old joke about the elderly man standing behind a woman and her young son at the supermarket checkout. The man looks down at the boy and asks “How old are you young fellow?” The boy, with great pride, announces that he is six and in turn asks the man the same question. “87” says the senior with a wistful air full of memories of the passing years. “Gee, I would never want to be that old” replies the boy with firm assurance. “Ah” says the old man, “you will change your mind when you are 86.”
Mick & Keith
“Time is on my side, yes it is!”
Sirs Mick and Keith, along with their Rolling Stones bandmates, once crooned with certainty that time was on their side. Just like the young boy they would never wish to be 87 years old. Fifty years after they sang these words however, I think they might have a different opinion, artistic license aside, as to whose side Father Time is really on.
Yet time is a wonderful idea to toy with. Why do some things seem as if they happened just yesterday even if, in reality, they were long ago? Other events though, quite recent, can seem so far away it is as if they were lived in a different life altogether. We flip years for decades and vice versa. Just when we think we know time it turns the tables on us.
Here I propose two “time games” to help us think of how our lives have passed.
The first is to imagine how few “links” in a generational chain are necessary to go back pretty far in history. The other is to think of a major event in your life and determine if it is closer to the present or to a time much further back in the past. Confused? Let’s look at a couple of examples that will explain what I mean.
In 1938 the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania staged a reunion, led by President Franklin Roosevelt, for those Civil War vets who were still living—twenty of whom had actually fought in the July 1863 battle. Hundreds of the believed 4,000 or more living vets attended. The median age of these old timers was just a nip under 94 which put their birthdates sometime around 1844.
In the 1840s, even taking into account the early average mortality of the era, there were undoubtedly still a large number of people who were alive when the Declaration of Independence had been signed.
This means that there are plenty of men and women alive today (I miss by only six years but my brother would have made both Blue and Gray) who could have at least sat on the lap of one of the Civil War veterans. In turn, hundreds of those Civil War vets could have sat on the lap of a person alive when Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson were forging a new nation and the world was still lit only by fire.
My father, for example, was born in 1926 and therefore 12 when the Gettysburg reunion was held. Long past being of an age to sit on the lap, he could have actually talked to these
I’m sure you see where this is going…I need to go back only four generations to link with someone who was alive at the time when the Founding Fathers met in Independence Hall. From
It is surprising how quickly one can spring backward in time using this trick. I recently read of a man from London who, with a mere eight of these generational links in the chain, can follow his ancestors back to the time when Henry VIII was taking a fancy to Anne Boleyn. Granted this gentleman was connecting those generations by linking a very old person with a very young one, (much like my father with the Civil War veteran) but in, so to speak, no time flat he had a connection to the Middle Ages.
Too complicated of an explanation? Perhaps an easier way might be to simply imagine the oldest person that could have held your grandmother or grandfather in his or her arms when they were newborns. If your grandfather was born in 1880 it is very possible that person doing the holding could have been born in 1790!
The second time game
For my parent’s generation, it is the memory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy that is vivid in their memories. Yet that November day is now well over fifty years ago and far closer in time to the end of the First World War in 1918 than it is to today.
If you were born in the early 1960’s as I was, your birthday is much closer in time to the solo flight of Lindbergh across the Atlantic then to today’s date. The shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986? Far closer mid-1950s than today. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? Sorry, closer in time to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and the King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations than right now.
Easy isn’t it? Simply take an event that occurred sometime during your lifetime and look at the number of years from then to today. Then go backward from that event the same number of years. This equidistant time point gives you a good idea just how long ago things happened in your life. Sobering when you start to think that even for those of us in our middle years that many of our important life events are closer in time to the administration of Harry Truman and the beginning of the Korean War than to the present day.
Such games show us how time spills and slides as quickly as mercury does from a broken thermometer. When we toy with time it gladly plays along. While we will never be time’s master, we can use our memories and generational links to jump backward and forward within it.
It also shows us how nuanced time is. Think of that 87-year-old man in the grocery store. He could easily live for another 20 years or so. As I write this in 2018, there are at least 100 confirmed
The ranks of these
Daydream a little bit, enjoy the ride, and of course Stay Average!
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Easy to daydream after 18 holes on a beautiful day of “average” golf. I’m a 1951 baby & the grandson of a WW1 combat veteran of the “All American” Infantry Division in the French trenches. He marched through the streets of London during a victory parade in front of King George V & never returned to Europe in his 90 year life span. He was born in 1895 & knew a lot of Civil War vets. I wish I could remember all the stories he told me riding with him on his route as a rural mail carrier for the USPS in the late 50’s & early 60’s…
Thanks for the comment Bill. Here we are in 2018 and you have a link with your grandfather who was born many years before Orville and Wilbur decamped to the Outer Banks, rural electrification, and the WW1. I really like thinking about that connection we have to the past.
Although our time at Furman overlapped, you have inadvertantly assigned me to your parents’ generation, owing to my recollection of the assassination of JFK! I was watching the motorcade on television, and the five year old me fetched my mother to tell her “that man got shot.”
By virtue of your time game I have realized for the first time that I was born closer to the turn of the 20th Century than to today. Now “close” is relative, but still the point is made.
Possibly further to your point, I recall being a child and outdoors with my father. I suspect this would have been several outings between ’62 and ’64. A plane would fly over and dad would stop whatever he was doing and stare at it with rapt focus. Dad was born in ’28, the year the Graf Zeppelin entered commercial service. These noises and sights from the sky were a novelty in his lifetime, and it showed in his sense of wonder.
Great comment Fitz! Interesting game is it not to think about just where the events of our lives fit into the grand scheme of time. Thanks for your post.