What are days for?

The older I get the quicker the years go. Ten years ago seems like yesterday, and yet twenty years ago does now seem rather distant. It’s a strange thing, time, how it plays tricks on us.

Augustine asked “What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words. Yet what do we speak of in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an enquirer I do not know.”[1]

Einstein showed us that time and space are in fact part of the same thing. When the universe started, time started. So in answer to the question ‘What happened before the universe?’ the answer is ‘Nothing’, there is no before, because before is part of time, and time is part of the universe. (Now if this is making your head ache, it’s making my head ache too!)

Perhaps we should come back down to Earth in trying to understand these things. Philip Larkin wrote “What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us time and time over. They are happy to be in: where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.”[2]

We need neither the priest nor the doctor to come running over the fields. Surely the answer lies in the fact that we are in time and space, it is where we live, breathe and have all our being.

I started off with a question. Another year has gone. It has been filled with happiness and sadness; profit and loss; love and hate; health and illness; life and death. “The days of our life are three score years and ten, or if our strength endures, even four score; they soon pass away and we are gone. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”[3]

It seems to me that wisdom is the practical application of our understanding. I understand that my time and yours are limited. Time is short. So whatever time in the end is, this I know: It is a gift that I will not discard with yesterday's paper

Time for a cup of tea.

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[1] Saint Augustine: The Confessions, book 11, chapter 17 tr. Henry Chadwick. Oxford 1991

[2] Days, The Whitsun wedding Philip Larkin: Faber & Faber. London 1964

[3] Psalm 90, verses 10 and 12.