Time

Subject: Time

As we watch the days and the weeks drain away, wrapped up in the cotton wool of our homes, insulated from the injustice others bring upon us, the question of what importance, if any, do we consider "time" to be.
Is time a period in and through which we live regardless or is it a period where we are given an opportunity to change and do things. Our lives are relatively short and much is made of success, which these days often means making money. The chap propped up in a chair reading is wasting his time unless his reading is defined by what he reads and the benefit it brings him. But what if he reads for pleasure or reads just to understand more of the world around him. Isn't that self indulgent and in our world of the email and the immediate response to someone else's problem shouldn't we pause to examine just what is time for.
Obviously it's method of measuring where we are on a time line of events. The activities in the past, irretrievable the ones in the future unobtainable for the moment,  and only the ones in the "now" have any real importance.
But what if time were allowed to hang, to be suspended from our itinerary, allowed to lose its importance as we merged those minutes and hours into a delightful indolence, where the heart and the head are allowed to merge and get to know one another.
The head always impetuous, always driving for results, the heart more inclined to sit back and see what happens. The French and the Italians have a way with time, long breaks in the middle of the day, a nap after a meal. Their love of food and cooking, their propensity to court a lady by conversation, not the lust of the Anglo Saxon.
Time then is something to savour and to study as we do when thinking on a personal level. Time is just as well spent doing nothing as doing something. The presbyterian ethic regarding their claim that "idle hands do the Devils work" must have something to do with the fact that a mind at rest has the opportunity to seek out many falsehoods, including the claims made in the name of religion.
Wrapped up in the fragrance and warmth of my newly laundered sheets  I have to ask where have all the tomorrows gone. It's a feature of this new timeless dispensation where we are never quite sure which day it is, each morning looking the same, we lay in bed contemplating the time in front of us. The implausibility of it, the shock, time has become ours and not theirs and we must not be scared to learn that wasting it is just as satisfying as using it.Time