Clock Faces: Time Only Moves Forward

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”
William Penn

The psalmist wrote words to remind you and me to number our days in order to apply our hearts to wisdom. [1]

Easier said than done. Right?

Clock by Linda Pastan

Sometimes it really upsets me—the way the clock’s hands keep moving, even when I’m just sitting here not doing anything at all, not even thinking about anything Why or why not? except, right now, about that clock and how it can’t keep its hands still. Even in the dark I picture it, and all its brother and sister clocks and watches, even sundials, all those compulsive timepieces whose only purpose seems to be to hurry me out of this world. The Past is history. The future is mystery. Now is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.

Like a tightrope walker, I must hold tension between the present where my toes hold space and where my mind and my eyes look ahead.

Learning to Drive in the Dark

I remember learning to drive in a simulator. Driver’s Ed in Southern California involved not only actual time behind a wheel in a car, but classroom time in a dark room, sitting in something that looked like a Tilt-a-Whirl spinning chair. There, as a student in a dark room, I looked ahead at a screen, kept my hands on the wheel, operated an accelerator and a brake with my right foot while pretending to drive on a road projected on the screen.

“Aim high in steering,” the instructor said.

What? What does that mean?

Look down the road. The curve you approach will get here sooner than you think. That car in front of you is closer than you think.

Look ahead to where you want to be, not only at what you can see right in front of you.

The future is something everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
C.S. Lewis

Paying Attention to My Life

In Driver’s Ed, we also watched films of actual car accident scenes and others simulated with high school student victims. “Pay attention,” the instructor said.

Once upon a time, there was a commercial on television where a uniformed highway patrolman surveyed the wreckage at the scene of a motor vehicle accident. He looked around at the pieces before saying, “This guy was right. Dead right.”

Sometimes not yielding the right of way ends in disaster.

Sometimes not heeding the signals about time accelerates the sensation of speed.

Sometimes when an accident occurs, people describe feeling that it happened in slow motion.

No matter how you and I perceive time, the movement of time keeps us wound around its passing.

“The great irony of our day, we have the most sophisticated, elaborate time-keeping devices ever. Watches on our wrists, clocks stare at us from all directions, T.V. lets us hear and see what’s going on, yet never has there been a generation as ignorant of the answer to one little question. ‘What time is it?’”
Vance Havner

Cleaning my office, clearing the clutter, and reminding myself that how I spend my time is how I spend my life

“Wisdom brightens a person’s face and changes it’s hard appearance.” Ecclesiastes 8:1

What I didn’t expect to find while going through files, getting rid of more than 100 books and countless pages from notebooks that served their time, I noticed signposts of where I have been and much of what matters to me.