Time

I've concluded that time is not my friend. Oh, it flows well enough. It is steady and reliable, but it is also unrelenting. Some say that time is a mechanism to prevent everything from happening at once. This is very convenient, and I appreciate that, but at the same time, it also prevents one from enjoying anything for any significant amount of time.

The theory of relativity says that if you were to travel really fast, then everything else around you would appear to speed up. This would be a good way to skip commercials on TV, or to pass the time while waiting for the next Harry Potter book to come out, but it is a one-way trip. If you forgot to take your spouse with you while you were waiting out the next few presidential elections, you'd come home to an older, lonelier, and probably very grumpier spouse.

Some people consider time to be the fourth-dimension. I think this is faulty thinking. We have three dimensions in our everyday life -- we can go up and down, forwards and backwards, and left and right -- through which we can all travel with relative ease. However, time, the so-called fourth dimension, isn't so simple to navigate.

In the world of science fiction, it is an interesting theoretical study that one could create a time machine to move around in time. It makes for good reading to wonder what would happen if you killed one of your own grandparents before they had any children, or if you stepped on a butterfly twenty million years ago, or if you went forward in time and brought home some advanced technologies. Usually, such alterations in the events of history past or history future have severe consequences, and it is generally thought that messing with time is undesirable.

But sometimes, I do really want to be a master over time. For example, some days I want to keep my children in their young age so I can enjoy their youthful enthusiasm, their ease of laughter, and their delight at learning new things. Other days, I want them to be much older, so I could actually stop changing diapers, or take my children out on more adult excursions than just to Chuck-E-Cheese's. Some days, I just want to lie in bed with my wife for untold hours, cuddling beneath the blankets and enjoying the warmth. Other times, I just want to add hours more to the day, for I never seem to be able to get things done in the time I have available. Or just to have enough time to actually get enough sleep! And wouldn't it be great to be able to go back in time to make changes (make corrections AND make mistakes?) to what we've done so that we could see how things would have worked out had we done something different? (Then back track to our "baseline" lives ... but only if we wanted to?)

But none of this is possible to us right now. I don't think it ever will be. God has created this universe to run only forward, no doubt for very good reasons. One of these days, I intend to ask him about that.