No. 9 Time is Not on My Side

Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me.
- The Rolling Stones, ‘Time Waits For No One’

Indeed. Apparently we don’t buy Oranges anymore. Well not big ones, anyway. You know the ones the size of a small beach ball that you need an ice-pick or similarly fashioned tool to remove the rhinoceros-like hide from. Nobody has time for that anymore. It’s now just the wee fellas. The ‘easy-peelers’. Rip the skin off with your thumb and consume in two bites. Nice and easy. Gives us all more time to rush around like headless chickens. More time to getting nothing done. More time to hurtle without focus along the narrow, unswerving highway to kingdom come.

No matter how hard I wish it to happen, time won’t stand still. I’ve tried every trick in the book in an attempt to get a grip on the passage of time, but to no avail. This includes such desperate measures as counting the minutes, counting the seconds… I even read back through this blog once… *shudder* Never again. But nothing can stop the momentum that has picked up around the life of Jeffman and is sending him hurtling ever closer to the only real certainty in this life.

But wait up one minute. It wasn’t always like this. I was once young, carefree and with no concept of what time was or its withering effects. When you’re a kid the days blend seamlessly together without distinction or betraying any notion that they won’t last forever. Then you hit adulthood and it’s as though the party will never end. We abuse ourselves without a thought for any long term effects. After all, we’re invincible, aren’t we?

The Great Leveller
But then something happens. A great leveller arrives to kick us all into touch and let us know that the party’s well and truly over. In my case I hit 30, and since then it’s been one fast blur.

I’ve absolutely no idea where time goes. It’s as though I’m locked inside my own little bubble that runs on a different time mechanism to everybody else. Whereas they go about their everyday lives performing as they’d expect to, I just never seem to have the time to get anything done.

I finish work on a Friday evening, and before I’ve even had time to so much as sit down for a minute, let alone contemplate what I’m going to get done, it’s Monday morning again. Saints preserve us all. I look at the sum total of what I’ve achieved in my freetime and nine times out of ten come back with a big fat zero. Then before I’ve had a chance to work out why I allowed this to happen, it’s Friday again and another weekend worth of unproductivity awaits. All the time I keep my eye on the clock, trying to will that second hand to ease up the pace a touch, prolong the passage of time before I have to go to work again.

But I live in a world of defective clocks. Each one I own sharing a fault in its calibration that makes the second hand travel faster than everybody else’s. And whilst it’s me contemplating getting up for work the next day following, say, the Christmas holidays; everybody else has just broken up and is getting into the swing of it. And so a second becomes a minute, a minute an hour, an hour a day, and a day bypasses the weeks and months and becomes a year.

Psychedelic Blur
All this hurtles past at lightning speed whilst I stand bewildered in the midst of the psychedelic blur it leaves in its wake. Wondering where the time went and how I managed to waste it doing what seemed to be so much but achieved so little.

Grab the moment? I tried that. The ‘moment’ only hangs around long enough to gloat back at you, delivering a discourteous ‘f*ck you’ before slipping through your fingers and disappearing into the ether.

But it’s not just me. The case of the humble Orange proves that everybody thinks time is running out on them. Time is the predatory, unsuitable lover that discards us once we’ve served their lurid purpose.

Aside from the living in disillusionment, dejection, and despair, everybody’s always in a rush. Never a moment to stop and think, for fear that the truth might catch up with them, whilst careering onwards through increased working weeks to meet imagined and unreasonable deadlines, putting us all a step closer to an early grave.

Time is officially not what it used to be. You reach a certain age and the cold realisation that you’ve achieved the square root of sweet F.A. hits home like a block of blue ice from an overhead plane.

The Harsh Reality
Gone for good are the carefree days; the innocence and exuberance of youth replaced by the fear and desperation of real adulthood. The type where your responsibilities sit uneasily alongside the omnipresent fear that you’re only one pay packet away from another kick in the balls, followed by repossession or eviction and a life wandering the streets, muttering to yourself as you try to pinpoint the exact moment it all went wrong, wishing what little time you have left away for the chance to go back and make it right.

Time, and Oranges, wait for no one. And indeed, it has no intention of waiting for me.

Is time waiting for you? Let me know in the handy comment box below.

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