When I Was Five: a reflection on time

Antique clocks: Image - courtesy of Pixabay

For scientific, commercial, sporting and numerous 

everyday purposes, it is important that time is measured. In the first three of the above arenas, it is critical that time is measured very precisely, so the electronic transition of an atom of the element caesium is now how a second is measured. Precision is assured.

 

Our ‘felt experience’ of time is much less clear-cut, though we are all aware of the passage of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and so on. In the western world most people own clocks and watches of various qualities and many, many lives are driven by the passage of time which only moves in one direction, from past to present to future. 

 

Whilst time’s passage is absolutely regular we use phrases like ‘Time is dragging’, which may be very pertinent whilst we struggle with precautions against the spread of coronavirus. The opposite perception that ‘Time flies’ is frequently heard too.

 

So our lives are lived within our comparatively short time on earth. Comparative that is with the age of our planet or even more, the age of the universe.

 

Another often-heard phrase about time is that it seems to go faster the older we get.

 

This short reflection attempts to offer some illumination of this last observation.

 

When I Was Five. 

 

When I was five,

six months

took a tenth of my life.

 

Half-a-year had reduced

five years later, at ten,

to a twentieth part

of the life I’d had then.

 

On my twentieth, 

one fortieth.

 

Then when my age

to forty had climbed,

Two quarters -

an eightieth of my time.

 

And if I reach eighty,

six months will be

a hundred-and-sixtieth 

portion to me.

 

O unrelenting passage of time,

consider now this paradigm. 

It seems to me you ever unfold

by diminishing fractions 

as I grow old!

 

 

Trevor Thorn © 2020