Groundhog day: God & Time.

Groundhog Day: God & Time from Rob Bee on Vimeo.

2010 promises to be kind of a good year. I have 2 anniversaries to celebrate. In September Helen & I have our 10^th wedding anniversary and we have a few days holiday booked where we’re going to spoil ourselves and spend far too much money. But scary as it sounds being married to Helen for that long it’s the other anniversary that I find more daunting. In June this year it will be 20 years since I left school. That sounds like an awfully long time ago. I’ve written before about how I didn’t really get on that well at school and how much I disliked it, and we’ve said before at cafe sundae that it isn’t the end of the world if you fail exams as there are always other options, but school still remains a massively important part of life; it’s a formative time and your record and memory of school will follow you down the years. Fifteen years ago I remember being surprised at it being so long since I left school and it’s a feeling which still hasn’t gone away. I think that a part of it is that there’s a definite demarcation of time as you progress through the education system - year six, year seven, year eight and so on – but once you’re out of education that firm separation disappears and so one year can very easily blend into the next. Where progress through life was simply a question of being a year older and moving into the next class once these boundaries have been moved progress has to be earned by effort not default. If we’re not careful we can watch the years slip by expecting life to come to us until – to quote Pink Floyd – ‘one day you find ten years have got behind you, no-one told you when to run; you missed the starting gun.’

In this way time can get away from us, but we can’t get away from time. It ticks and it tocks, it ebbs slowly by, it slips through our fingers like sand as we try to hold it. It’s relentless and quiet and constant and going and invisible and irreversible and absolute and awesome and merciless. It rules the universe more than any other thing. The speed of light may be the universal constant, but it’s measured in time. Physicists may claim that time bends and distorts at the edges of the universe, but everything within it is subject to the ravages of time; everything ages, even the universe itself will end. Time is the canvas onto which the universe is painted.

If you decide to have a read of the bible and open it at page 1 – which I don’t recommend - you will see the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In the beginning. The first thing God had to do to be able to create the universe was create time, a medium in which the universe could work. Except that the language I’ve just used is wrong – we can’t say ‘the first thing God did was create time’ because that denotes a chronological order and we can’t have a chronological order without time, so before time was created (which we also can’t say) there was only God except we can’t really say that either as ‘was’ is the past participle of the verb ‘to be’ and denotes a time past, which we can’t have if we have no time. The most we can say is “Outside time, God.” And leave the beginning of genesis as it is with time already called into being. And this makes a nonsense of those idiots who say, “If God created man, who created God?” because they’re stuck in the idea that everything has a beginning and an end and everything being subject to time which if God was around before time – oops I mean outside time – he obviously isn’t subject to its course and can very easily have no beginning and end.

Time has provided a muse for many people to produce work on, the previously quoted Pink Floyd being just one. Cher sang (and I use the word in the loosest possible sense), “If I could turn back time...I’d take back the words that hurt you and you’d stay.” Jim Croce sang, “If I could save time in a bottle The first thing that I'd like to do Is to save every day Till Eternity passes away Just to spend them with you” Time travel has been a staple of science fiction writing in particular. Films like Groundhog Day, sliding Doors and Donnie Darko all use an abnormal passing of time as a central prop for the films plot to revolve around. Shakespeare said, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

A fairly common theme to lots of these ideas is the desire to ‘turn back time’ and get a second chance to do something which has gone wrong. We all have things that we’d do differently if we got chance, but we know that we never can, time cannot be undone. Once something is done or words are said then the moment has passed and it can’t be re-claimed and re-done. Decisions we make or actions we take can have repercussions into the future and bad decisions particularly seem to come back and bite us in the bum. I can see times in my life where I’ve had to make a choice and those choices have lead me to where I am now, had I made a different choice I would be somewhere totally different, I don’t know where but not Manchester, doing something completely different for a living. The choices I’ve made at a point in time have had repercussions not just for me but for other people as well. Time being linear I can’t go back and see how my life would have been different if I’d made a different choice. All we can do is live with the choices we make and aspire to make good choices when the time comes. The journalist Sidney J Harris said “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

So what can we conclude from all this? That we only get one shot at life, that we need to take opportunities as they are presented to us, that we need to decide what we want out of life and drive towards it. Do we want to be remembered after we die? Then we need to start making that happen now. There are few people out of the billions who have lived whose names we know. Beethoven, Einstein, Aristotle, Hitler & St Paul are names that live on long after they died. We can’t all hope to make such a big impression, but we can, if we so desire, aim to influence those around us. I still remember the names of teachers and youth leaders I knew who I thought were inspirational, each of us can make a mark - if we want to. Do we want to devote our life to making such a difference or do we want to devote it simply to pleasure?

Let’s quote some clichés here; why? Because they contain truth.

Carpe diem – seize the day;

A stich in time saves nine.

live each day as if it were your last.

You will never find time for anything, if you want time you must make it.

Time & Tide wait for no man.

I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’ll leave you in peace.