Time unites all humans, we are all constrained by it and march to its beat. We all have an allotted amount, a precious supply that starts to dwindle the day we are born. Time has one speed, the speed at which you live and take each breath. But reflecting on time would lead you to draw different conclusions. Remember how it seems like yesterday that you were a kid? Remember how it seems like yesterday that your kids were kids? That you were young? Looking back, time flies.
There are also moments in life when time seems to slow down, to advance in slow motion as though allowing for a study of the details. Never stopping, but certainly slowing. Life and death moments, when people enter and leave this world. I watched my grandfather take his last breath on a cold November day; I watched my daughter as she took her first breath on a cold February day. Time is all that separates them, all that keeps them from meeting. I span that time, also bound by time, just one link in the chain that connects them. For me both of these moments are vivid in my memory, those specific days seemingly endless as I lived them, yet I can feel time tearing at them as it passes, the edges fraying. Time has many speeds.
Life, memories, feelings, thoughts, desires, they are no match for time. Time is relentless, merciless, unprejudiced. Humankind has dammed massive rivers, gone to the moon, and mapped the human genome, but man cannot stop time, slow time down, or escape its bounds. Eventually all things are faded by time, physical structures, ideas, and emotions. The people with you when you are born, the people who brought you into the world, won’t be there to see you slip out of it. Time removes them and leaves in their place the ones you brought into the world. You watched them come into the world, they will watch you leave as your last bit of time slips away.
Make your time count.