TIME IS THE FIRE IN WHICH WE BURN

by Spook Larsen

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day,

You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way.

--Pink Floyd

The old saying goes, “time is money.”

I've always thought that should read, “time is like money.”

Being somewhat left of religious, I view my existence (yours, too) as all-too-finite. We get a certain amount of time—most of us able to read this English-language essay about 70 or 80 years—and when that last penny hits the bottom of the jukebox, well? Pay the check and save the last dance for me.

Of course there is a HUGE standard deviation of what any particular individual might rack up on the clock, ranging from nary outta the womb—or inside the womb if your carbon dating begins at, or closer to, conception—all the way up to Methuselah.

As a four-pack-a-day smoker of non-filtered sticks of charcoal, I'm kinda hoping I'll make it to my 70s, though that'll be a helluva stretch. [Still, rest assured that your humble narrator will bend every rule when it's his turn to spin the spinner in that ‘Winner-Takes-All' game of Twister with the Reaper.]

If you carry the simile out to its natural conclusion, then you'd have to reckon that the quality of your experiences during your time on this Rock could be thought of as yet another measure of your wealth as a ‘consumer of life'. Some folks are fortunate enough to be born—and spend all of their lives—with a silver spoon in their mouths, while the rest of us just get the thumb.

And the sad truth is that most of us will lead nasty, brutish, and short lives grinding it out before doing something stupid like offending the regime, landing us in a prison camp where we'll die too young in front of a firing squad.

And the anointed few?

Well, they get to be Jack Nicholson and Madonna.

Hitting the jackpot in this Game of Life means both living long and living large. The grand-prize winner is the centenarian who climbed Everest, swam with the sharks, seduced the beautiful, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

At the other end? Crack babies. (Although again perhaps your opinion runs to the conservative, in which case you'll count the aborted fetus as the ultimate of life's losers).

Now your cotton-variety monotheist, on the other hand, sees it all a little differently. For the spiritually-inclined—those Blessed Souls Who've Seen the Light—life is more like a test. Your time shoulder-to-the-grindstone in this world is your one and only chance not to screw up your shot at a sweet ride through eternity. If you're savvy enough to follow a few simple moral ‘guidelines' and meet a few spiritual demands, then you're in the clear. Ticket to Heaven: Admit One.

Granted, for those of us atheists in the foxhole the Abyss ain't much to look forward to. But if life is no more, nor less, than our paltry little itsy-bitsy teensy-weensy blink-and-it's-over ‘lifespan', if all that looms beyond this place of wrath and tears is the horror of the shade, then it all don't add up to much more than counting off the precious seconds in the Here-and-Now, and that constant ‘ Ka -CHING!' is the dread-filling sound of you spending your life.

[ Editor's Note: PusanWeb would like to extend its heartfelt thanks for the three minutes you'll blow on reading this. Sorry, no refunds. ]

There's actually a decidedly secular philosophical riff on the finitude of life that takes a rather novel approach to the subject. The idea goes back to the ancient Egyptians, but that old God-killer Fred Nietzsche re-popularized the notion of ‘eternal recurrence', in which history is circular, like one of them snakes eatin' it's own ass. The concept is a bit much to squeeze between my ears, but it basically hypothesizes a timeline of history that repeats over and over, ad infinitum.

What does that mean for you?

Ever use the phrase, “Been there, done that”?

And that feeling of déjà vu you're experiencing?

Glimpses of a past which you probably have already glimpsed before.

These disjointed and disquieting thoughts of the temporal came to me at exactly 2:01 p.m. Asia-Pacific Time over a week ago Monday when, for a moment, I was sure the air raid sirens were signaling incoming ordnance from our Nork neighbors to the North.

And that was exactly what I screamed in one of our campus lunchrooms as I dove under a table and curled into the fetal position. INCOMING!

One of my students, who was enjoying a meal on my nickel as a quid pro quo for some valuable Korean language assistance, popped his head under the table and said, “Guess we're having an unscheduled National Defense Emergency Test, huh?” Then he slid over in the chair next to him to avoid the yellow puddle inching toward his Nikes.

The student, ‘Marty', is a good kid; one of the few who continues to say hello to me even though he's no longer in any of my classes and, therefore, no longer has a vested interest in building kibun before grade time. The rest of my former students wouldn't acknowledge me if I was walking past them with a neon-lit sandwich board strapped to my naked body saying, “It's me! Prof. Larsen, your old teacher!”

Maybe that's not entirely fair. Some of the old gang still pause for a brief how-do-you-do, though the conversation usually goes something like, “Hey, teacher! It's nice to see you. Why did you give me a ‘B' in composition last semester, you f***wit? Do you even have a bachelor's degree?”

Which is why, even now, I continue to think of them not just as students, but more like my own children.

Where was I?

Okay, so maybe you're wondering how long before we humans take our next trip around the Time Loop?

In the absence of Nork mischief, Holy War, or Clashing Civilizations, about six billion years.

Just about that time, by my watch, the Andromeda galaxy will come crashing into our own Milky Way in the penultimate of Star Wars.

I learned about this unfortunate future event in a science article on the web about this very thing happening in some distant corner of our universe at this very moment. Somewhere out there in Luke Skywalker territory, two rather hefty gravitational fields are currently engaged in a galactic body slam. (See the pretty picture of cosmic destruction at right!)

Knowing that it is our own destiny to spiral headlong into another galaxy a few billion years down the road is of no comfort. I sure do hope that that future race of android supermen can figure out either time travel or warp speed before gaseous balls of space gunk starts raining down on Planet Earth. I may not be around to see it, but I'll be pulling for the home team to gut it out in the bottom of the ninth just the same.

Since time is fleeting and madness takes its blah, blah, blah, what kind of sage advice can I offer you by way of a nugget of wisdom to get you the maximum return on your investment of time?

Okay, here's one, but it's not mine. It belongs to that wily New Age health guru Deepak Chopra. The good doctor, who makes his ducats hawking the virtues of mixing Eastern and Western medicine, has done some hospice work back during his day job. Chopra said that in all the time he spent with the dying, not one terminally ill patient ever said they'd wished they'd spent more time at the office.

I've translated this little gem into a personal motto to help me have a more rewarding trip through the present, words I've come to absolutely LIVE by: Take frequent breaks.

Hope you consider that time (and money) well spent.

 

 

Interested in reading more from Spook Larsen? Check out Axis of Evil here.