About Time

Relativity is considered scientific fact now rather than theory. If you are traveling really, really fast, time will appear to move more slowly for you than for people remaining at your departure point. Your kid brother could graduate college, have a career, raise a family and retire to Sun City in the time it takes you to play a hand of gin rummy on your speeding space ship.

For those of us in the second half of our lives, relativity in the passage of time is obvious. I got a big dose of it during the holiday. I get to see my granddaughter about every two months. The effect is like a time lapse video where the camera records a few frames every minute, then it plays back at 30 frames per second so that a seed appears to germinate, grow, and blossom in just a few seconds.

In my eyes, Amelia has grown from a hairless, funny-shaped, pink bundle of cute into a walking, talking, curious little girl almost overnight.

But from her perspective, everything outside of her fast-changing mind and body moves at glacial pace. After all, a year is half of her life. It's just 1/60th of mine. During the time she's tripled in size, learned to walk, and use words, I've lost a few hairs and the lines on my face have deepened a smidge.

I remember once asking my own grandmother if she had always been old. When she told me no, that she'd started out pretty much like I did, I didn't believe her. I had never noticed her changing at all.

Now I am seeing things from the perspective she had. Sometimes the world seems to change as if I was living in that time-lapse video. And I find myself doing what television producers do during a live program - tracking the time remaining until master control takes over and fades to black.

Nothing in a live production ever goes exactly as planned - an interview runs long or short, a segment is cancelled at the last moment because of a technical problem, something unexpected preempts something that was planned - so the producer is constantly comparing how much time remains with how much content remains. Good material has to be dropped because there isn't enough time.

I've already used up more than half of my time on earth, and there are a lot of things I'd like to cram in before I fade to black.

Some options disappear sooner than others: How much longer will I physically be able to cross-country ski? How much longer will Amelia be content to sit on my lap and let me read her stories?

And some things I'd like to do would take too long. I always thought it would be fun to live in Chicago for a few years, in a neighborhood with a good bar and a softball team. Back timing . . . I've already slipped something else into that time slot.

I've also learned the hard way that even the best plans can fall apart, and it's a good idea to have something to back fall on. Stretching the TV show analogy: I still wake up some nights remembering the time I was the guest-host of a live, television show where - after I had been made up, installed in the host chair and attached to a microphone - I was informed that every scheduled guest had cancelled. An instant later I heard the theme music playing and a voice in my earpiece saying, "Live in 5-4-3-2 . . ." When plans fall through and you don't have other options, each passing minute dies a slow, agonizing death.

But finding creative ways to consume time becomes less of an issue as we see the time remaining in our lives shrinking. I have starting taking the expression "spending time" literally, and find myself less tolerant of people who waste it.

A couple of years ago I was traveling with a translator and a young project coordinator who, while being consummate professionals during working hours, consistently arrived fifteen minutes to a half-hour after the times they set to meet for meals or recreational trips.

After the third or fourth time it happened, I told them they were insulting me and I was angry. When they decided not to make the effort to be on time, they were telling me they thought my time had no value. And the fact that they knew I had much less time remaining in my life than they had made the insult event greater.

They were scrupulously on time for everything for the remainder of the trip.  But . . .

A few months later I had coffee with a trainer who had recently worked with the same project manager. She made a point of telling the story of how she had been very late for a project meeting one day, and the young manager had said something to her that made her feel really guilty. The manager told her that by her tardiness, she had told everyone who had to wait that she thought their time was worth less than hers.

I had arrived at the coffee shop ten minutes late. I felt awful.