Despite the challenges, time is still our friend

BEFORE he crashed his experimental plane into Monterey Bay on October 12 1997 at the age of 53, John Denver wrote some darn good songs.

The one circling in my brain this week is Friends with you. The lyrics go as follows: “What a friend we have in time, gives us children, makes us wine, tells us what to take or leave behind. And the gifts of growing old, are the stories to be told, of the feelings more precious than gold. Friends I will remember you, think of you, Pray for you, And when another day is through, I’ll still be friends with you”.

I know it’s not highbrow poetry, but its appeal lies in being a kind of modern Auld Lang Syne.

Time is a gift for scientists, poets and philosophers and each for a very different reason.

For scientists it is the fourth dimension, following the trinity of height, width and depth. Time is what makes a pile of still pictures into cinema. Time sequences our lives into before, now and next.

John Denver has already made the poet’s point, and for philosophers time is a challenge. Almost every heavyweight philosopher has had to come up with an explanation for the phenomenon that is so much part of our experience.

Most famous is probably Martin Heidegger, whose magnum opus is titled Being and Time ( Sein und Zeit in German). The philosophers also came up with the word zeitgeist, which translates “spirit of the age”, and is the title of Peter Joseph’s 2007 cult movie which explored significant conspiracy theories at the time. Let’s face it, at least for now, time is here to stay. And whenever we find the whole idea of time too limiting, the human spirit simply extends the idea into a notion we call eternity. That wonderful place that is beyond the constraints of time, where we believe we will live forever in a place of our favourite imaginings. (Think harps, fire pools or virgins?)

It’s not sure if he coined it, but Woody Allen is credited with my favourite quote about eternity, “Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end”.

With all this focus on time, with the old year being counted out and the clocks chiming in the new, it may be worth remembering that the universe is not that affected by our obsession with chronology and horology.

Time is just another human construct to help us survive and explain our existence, and as with religion, we differ like billy-o.

A quick scout of Wikipedia revealed 49 calendars in current use, including the Xhosa calendar, which starts in June and ends in May when the star Canopus signals the harvest. There are 23 obsolete calendars, like the Icelandic and Egyptian, and 14 proposed new calendars awaiting their time to shine.

It’s confusing I know, but as John Denver suggested, time remains a friend who brings good things, fades the bad, and helps us remember.

Happy New Year. 2015, I think?