Our home is filled with clocks. Although Susan and I both wear watches, we hardly have to look at our wrists to tell what time it is. In our bedroom there is a clock with a digital display that is the brightest light in the room at night. In the kitchen, there is a clock on the stove, another on the microwave, one on a radio and a fourth that is just thrown in for the fun of it. We have a wall clock in the living room and a schoolhouse style clock in the basement. I have two clocks in my library. If we want to check the time, there are always the clocks in our phones and on the computer. The web site, www.time.gov will connect you to a clock that is accurate to within 0.2 seconds if you need to know the exact time. One of the clocks in our kitchen connects to a satellite and displays the time accurately.

The clocks in our home fall into different categories. We have clocks with digital displays and clocks with faces. We have clocks that are powered by electricity and those that have to be wound. I don’t try to get all of our clocks so that they are displaying the exact same time. I try to keep them within a couple of minutes or so, but that is close enough to me. We have three clocks that chime and I always figure that if I get them so that they all chime in the same minute or so that is close enough. Though this morning there is probably about two minutes between the time the first one started to chime and the last one finished chiming.

We have had guests who found the chiming and the rather loud ticking of the clocks to disrupt their sleep. When we have guests, I usually ask them and show them how to stop the pendulums so that they can get their rest. The problem with that is that when the clocks don’t chime, it tends to wake me up. I’ve been known to get up in the wee hours of the night to wind a clock because I miss the sound of its chime and that wakes me up. The trick is to remember to wind the clock before going to bed.

Compared to many cultures, ours seems to be obsessed with time. We consider punctuality to be a virtue and are offended if someone is late for an appointment. I have been compulsive enough about time to bother family members by having to leave before it is absolutely necessary. I’d prefer to arrive early rather than late and I like to have a little spare time incase something unforeseen occurs. Since unforeseen things often do not occur, I often arrive early. There are those who see no need to arrive early. I have to admit that my need to arrive early can be silly at times.

Time, however, is a human construct. It is something we have made up in order to explain the flow of days and seasons. We have based our concept of time on things that we can observe. The span between the sun’s highest point one day and its return to that place the next constitutes a day. We’ve divided the day into 12 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into sixty seconds. We could have used different measures. In a metric system, there would be ten hours per day with ten minutes per hour and ten seconds per minute. That would probably give rise for the need for a smaller measurement of time, so we would develop names for the various digital breakdowns. For what it is worth, for scientific purposes seconds are divided into tenths and hundredths for more accurate measurements.

We use the passing of years to measure the span of lifetimes. Most world cultures use the passing of seasons as a way of counting the span of a life, though this seems to be more prevalent in places farther from the equator and a bit less so in places with smaller variations between the seasons. The concept of 40 winters doesn’t make much sense to those who live close to the equator.

In some sense, I suppose, we measure time because our supply of time is finite. We are mortal. Each of us will die in our own time. We do not go on forever. So it might be said that we are trying to count the amount of time we have left. That, of course is an impossible challenge. There are simply too many factors for us to be able to weight all of them. We know that there could be undetected diseases and unforeseen accidents. We know that some people die in sudden and traumatic ways. None of us knows the time of our own death, even those who have been given dire diagnoses by doctors or sentences by the courts. Insurance companies figure the odds and examine the statistics in order to come up with averages that allow their financial operations to succeed, but they know that they will have to pay some claims before the premiums from that particular insured person have covered the cost. There are things that can alter the timing of our lives.

So, in a sense, we count time and try to number days in an impossible task. We cannot succeed in knowing, but that doesn’t keep us from trying. This obsession with time prevents us from being able to grasp the concept of eternity. When we think of the eternal, we often think of something that spans all of time. God existed at the beginning, exists throughout all of time and will exist at the end. But there is a flaw in that image because God is beyond time. God existed before the beginning and will exist after the end. Eternal is literally without time. When we try to think of such a concept, it confuses us.

Perhaps the best way for us to experience eternity is not in trying to grasp every moment, but in trying to be fully present in this moment. Prayer and meditation techniques allow one to focus only on the present. Buddhists call this practice “presentness.” The concept exists in most world religions. Set aside your notions of time and just experience the moment. Really focus your attention so that you are not thinking about the past or the future. It takes practice. We tend to want to allow memory and anticipation to invade our thinking. It is a powerful and useful experience – a practice worthy of daily discipline.

It does, however, take time. Time elapses while one meditates.

Every time I try to write about the concept of time I realize that I really don’t know much about time at all.

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