Don’t get excited or frightened by the title of this blog, this has nothing to do with the Einsteinium viewpoint of relativity, e=MC squared or whatever it is, whatever it was that brilliant theoretician and mathematical wizard of a genius conceived of, formulated and proceeded to prove…Oh hell no! That is way beyond my comprehension and no doubt, no offense, I am sure way beyond the comprehension level or interest of most of my readers as well! No, this is just me, musing on life and the paradox of time on yet another cool and foggy day in San Francisco, early in June, 2015…

This last month of May has been an exceeding fast paced month for me, because my daughter and granddaughter are visiting me and we have been doing many fun outside activities….Every single day we have been going somewhere, like Fisherman’s Wharf, roller skating at the Golden Gate park, going to Haight Ashbury and browsing the stores and soaking up the atmosphere several times, and the time has just flown by!

We have had a lot of fun and are busy seemingly from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep late at night…We have all had a real blast, and the time zips by like a runaway train…

It is funny but there are other months that were the exact opposite, where my perception of time was radically altered! …Time is truly a paradox, sometimes days, weeks, months fly by and you can scarcely remember what happened to them, what you did, who you saw, on any particular day…

In fact, in these months you can’t even recall any particular day, it all just flows by so rapidly, like a mudslide of things that occurred, things that got done or got put off, people you saw or didn’t see, bills you may have paid, deadlines that had to be met etc etc…

And then there are months like last April, where I swear everything seemed to have been put into the super.… slow….. mode….I actually love it when this happens, because it means that for one thing nothing bad really happened, because that always is a demarcation point in one’s life…

But still it proved that nothing exceptionally good happened either, which sometimes is OK, because again that would interrupt the flow of time in a tangible, real time way…No, last April just sort of flowed by, peacefully, routinely and without any defining outside events that would speed it up or make it like almost every other month…

I am writing this all off the top of my head, my recollections of last April, and I may as well have titled it “A Glorious Saturday Afternoon,” because one day in the middle of the month I spent like 2 hours outside doing absolutely nothing especially memorable, yet every instant of the day is etched into my mind by the sharp stylus of memory….

It began by my dragging my sick, dying of kitty-cancer cat and constant companion of the last 17 years out from his little hidey hole by the side of the fridge where he has been moleing for the last several weeks…It has been more than somewhat depressing lately, because every day I approach him in the morning with trepidation, thinking this may be the day that he is dead, the day I find him cold and unmoving, and that is no fun way to wake up each morning, and he is no obvious pain…

But he was fine as usual today, i really admire the raw animal vitality cats and all animals have, all his vital signs were strong and he ate his breakfast hungrily, as usual, then decided to go mole his way back besides the fridge….But today, I wanted him to experience the warm April sunshine, I do this every day when it is warm, and so i dragged him outside…

Imagine my surprise to see him completely transformed into the curious, restless, inquisitive beast he has always been in the past! He was, well not exactly frisky as a kitten, but he refused to nap, he wanted to explore and test his boundaries by walking back to the parking area, where I had to turn him back repeatedly because of the reality that if he darted under one of the parked cars, I would have a really hard time retrieving him….

One of my friends in the building, one of my upstairs neighbors came down and sat on the steps and smoked a cigaret, and we had a casual but lively conversation about current events and what she could do to spend her afternoon, since she was bored and had no particular place to go, or be, just like me…Of course our conversation was repeatedly cut off by me chasing down my cat, or by the noisy streetcars that rumble by repeatedly and make any lengthy conversations impossible…

The cat was inspirational, he repeatedly explored new areas, he went to the back, he walked up to the corner, he finally flopped down and took a nap for a while…He woke up when another neighbor from across the street came by and this neighbor had a large, friendly dog with him, off the leash…My cat woke up from his cat nap when he smelled or sensed the dog and walked fearlessly up to her and sniffed her, then satisfied there was no threat, he just went back to sleep!

This is not per se a column about my cat, although he was an integral part of that particular day…The point is, the afternoon just flowed by, effortlessly, easily, in no particular sequence of events, just random happenings that occurred and then passed by…In fact, THAT is the whole point of this blog, the whole month of April was like this, today was just one day in a seemingly endless supply of days, just a lazy Saturday microcosm of the entire month, distilled and refined and purified to the very essence of time slowed down and passing by of it’s own accord, of it’s own volition, at it’s own leisurely pace…

 

Maybe that is the secret of time, to just let it flow, to just ride along with it, like a surfer on a wave, and not worry about deadlines or bills or fixed, preordained places you HAVE TO be, people you HAVE TO see, appointments that you HAVE to make…I don’t know, like I said, i am writing this off the top of my head, but it just seemed so right, so perfect of a day that I had to take note of it….

Maybe time is best ignored, it is just a background upon the really important things that happen in life, slow lazy conversations with friends, playing with your pets, soaking up the warm California sunshine, just letting things play themselves out…I have always been consumed by a fascination with the nature of time, i wish that i was smart like Einstein and that i could figure out in some intuitive way, or else scientifically devise, produce and promulgate some unified theory of time, like he did by mathematically proving his unified theory of relativity….

What Einstein did was a revolutionary accomplishment in the world of physics, it was an objective verification of what was before simply a subjective, random collection of facts, seemingly not connected in any way, but in the end he proved that they were all tied together, it was a unified theory that was objectively, mathematically provable!

Time is slippery, it is elusive, trying to even define the exact nature of time is like trying to hold water in your hands….. Because it is always slip sliding away, oh so close but in the end beyond my grasp, beyond all of our grasp….I always seem to be right on the verge of coming up with some grand theory of the nature of time only to once again watch it slip helplessly, inexorably, through my fingers…

As the old saying goes “Where does the time go?” I guess sometimes it goes nowhere, in fact maybe it never goes anywhere, it is always just simply a backdrop against which we measure the events of our lives, like that old soap opera “Days Of Our Lives,” with its compelling mantra of an introduction theme “So like sands through an hourglass, so go the days of our lives”…

I don’t know why the nature of time is so compelling to me, but I do know it has always been that way for me…I have always been fascinated by books or movies about time travel, if it is in fact possible, from the earliest days of Jules Verne and his mechanical contraption in “The Time Machine.”

I have progressed to the multidimensional concept of an infinite number of parallel universes as brilliantly proposed by the late author Michael Crichton in his book “Timeline”, which presupposes a multiverse of probabilities, an infinity of worlds almost exactly, precisely the same, split into intersecting time lines and denies the existence of time travel at all….

Whatever the exact nature of time is, whatever definition or label you want to put upon it, I consider myself fortunate to have experienced the fullness of time this entire last month in April, and especially this one glorious sun splashed California Saturday….Time was on my side this entire April, when everyhing was all slowed down, and equally so this entire May, when time flew by because of all the fun I was having with my family …I guess it’s like that old Led Zeppelin song, “Good times, bad times, you know I’ve had my share…”

What is time exactly? I guess,

Only time…will tell…..