The single metal hour hand lay on the table in front of me. Stephen and I had been playing with an old clock in an effort to get it to work. However, once the hands become loosened from the mechanism that counts off the minutes, even if it still ticks, the clock is effectively broken. We took the clock apart and kept the face to use for an art project. Gazing at the pointed hour hand I wished I could think of a way to put it to use. Finally I gave it to Stephen, thinking he might be able to make use of it in a collage.

The hand of time touches us all. Sometime it strokes gently, lulling us into complacency until we sit up and take notice. “Where did the time go?” we say and look around us to see if we can locate the lost minutes, hours or years. At other times it seems to have an iron grip on us, passing so slowly we want to scream in frustration. It’s definitely fickle and frolicsome, turning hair grey when our backs are turned. ave written a lot of poetry about time and its effects.

I have found that time is strangely elastic. It can stretch or shrink to suit how I am feeling. When I’m impatient, it seems to pass ever so much more slowly than when I am not thinking about it at all, but fully engaged in what I am doing. I remember once playing music with a friend during our lunch hour. We met in the room set aside for time off and began to tune our instruments. Then we started to play. I was fully engaged in the extraordinary joy of it.  Eventually I came to and began to worry that we had overstayed our time. When I looked at the clock I was amazed. It seemed we had entered a timelessness that stretched on and on, yet in real time we had been playing music for only half an hour.

The older I get the more conscious I am of the passage of time. Perhaps that is because there is less and less of it left to me with each passing year. Although almost nobody knows their expiration date, we all know that there is a limit to the time we have left, regardless how long or how short. I do not feel anxious or fearful about my personal duration; it’s just that I wish to make the best use of whatever time remains to me. Most have heard about one’s so-called bucket list. I gave that up a while ago. I prefer to content myself with making the most of every day I have. That gives me a better focus.

It’s odd how we speak of spending time. Minutes and hours are not real like dollars and cents. Yet often we treat time as though it was tangible–to be stored up or spent or hoarded or wasted. I remember my delight as a child at the thought of having a whole afternoon to do what I liked. Now I am grateful to have an hour or two when I might do something meaningless as opposed to productive. Sometimes I feel I am stealing time from what I ought to be doing. Then I remind myself that it is my time to do with as I wish, and I am a not a human doing but a human being.