The other day, I was walking along thinking about some
events from earlier in my life—maybe 20 years ago—and I realized that I had a
totally different take on these happenings than I’d had back then. “What a
difference time makes,” I thought to myself. That, in turn, brought to mind
several recent encounters with the phrase “the tincture of time,” and I was off
on a tangent pondering how time changes reality.
Of course we all know that time itself changes drastically
as we age. At this point in my life, it seems to rush by—and not just when I’m
having fun, either. I’ve actually written here before about some of the
explanations that folks have offered for that phenomenon—the way time speeds up
as we age. So I won’t dwell on it again (but if you’re curious, just click here for a trip
back in time to that blog). Instead, I want to talk about time, not as a
changing phenomenon but as a change agent—something
that actually does things to the
world as we know it. Which is to say, it does things to our worlds.
It all started when the phrase “tincture of time”
came to mind. But I knew that the transformation in my view of those earlier
experiences wasn’t about time acting as a tincture. It wasn’t healing old
wounds. This was more about time acting as a lens. Pretty soon, I was pondering
on several phrases that point to how time changes reality:
The
tincture of time. An old saw. I’m not sure whether time
heals all wounds (as many of us have likely been told), but I’ve lately been
learning that patience and forbearance—i.e., time—ease the sting of many of
them. It’s a valuable lesson that not only makes painful experiences feel less
totally devastating but also keeps me from exacerbating problems that are
better left to settle. When things really aren’t, on second thought, a big
deal, often settle if I don’t stir them around like a pot of smelly stew. The
tincture of time. Or, as Lennon and McCartney famously urged, let it be.
The
lens of time. This one fits the experience that
started my ruminations. For some reason, I discovered myself viewing old
experiences through a new lens. Actions by others that had bothered me back in
the day now seemed to have actually been kind and generous—my old view of them now
looked like a product of my own self-absorption at the time, a result of a
flawed lens. It reminded me, as I reflected on it, of how a camera lens does
this. Cameras don’t see the world like our eyes do. Big things recede, small
things come into focus, reality is morphed by the properties of the lens—or the
properties of time. And the world changes.
The
veil of time. Time hides some things and leaves
others open to view. Things that seemed so clear at one point slip from memory,
and we don’t even recognize their absence. I was talking to a 13-year-old the
other day, who wondered whether we had ever visited him in his home state. We
had, many times, so I reminded him of several of those. He flat-out didn’t
recall most of them. I could attribute this to his young age, but the one thing
he did recall was an experience as a 4-year-old when we persuaded some
firefighters on a lunch break to show him their truck, up-close and personal.
How many of my experiences have slipped from view without my noticing? And what
does it do to my understanding of the world and my life—how would my reality
change if memory X had vanished rather than memory Y?
Now, the idea the time itself actually shapes
reality isn’t an especially novel or startling concept, although I do think it somehow
takes on more salience as I age. Probably because time is so different, now, in
unforeseen ways. This is the first time, for instance, that I’ve ever been so
totally, suddenly aware—to the point of surprise—that time has dramatically
reshaped my understanding of a long-ago event. Without any effort on my part
and without my even noticing the process, until the new version cropped up,
unbidden, as I walked to the gym one morning.
Then I started thinking about all the ways that our language
about time also shapes our reality. I
once ran into a discussion of this, framed in terms of a personality typology.
But separating it from that theoretical framework, just think about how
different our encounter with time is when we talk, for instance, about spending time instead of about wasting it. Losing time vs. investing
time. Finding time to do something or losing track of time while we’re doing
something. So many words … devoting time, preserving time, making time,
protecting, using, taking time … and on and on. Each one says something about
the meaning of time—as a treasure, a nuisance, a commodity, a barrier, a
burden, a creation, an opening.
What difference would it make, I wondered, if I
made a conscious effort to use positive words when I think or talk about time.
Now that sounds like an interesting experiment.
I don’t know quite where all this is leading, what
I’m trying to say to you. I need to spend some time thinking about this. Maybe
that’s all this blog is really for—a reminder to pay more attention to time and
its place in my life and my language.
© Janis
Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to
the post.
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