Time has been on my mind lately; actually, it is never too far from the front of the line. However, I have been thinking about its relativity, but not the headache inducing theories of Einstein, which are way over my head.

 Many of us are likely content to think about it is an absolute measure, lest we open the doors to chaos. Personally, I am not sure what a minute means, because it can go by quickly or take forever. As finite as many of us think it is, I think it is totally subjective. Like everything else in our world, perception is the reality. I read that in his later years, Einstein believed past, present and future were happening simultaneously, or something close to that idea. In Buddhism, time is considered an illusion, like everything else we twist around to explain our lives, feeling the need for meaning.

 When I meditate, twenty-five minutes can take forever, another word with an amorphous meaning. My forty-minute run in the morning often feels like a marathon. When I try and construct these pieces, time gets eaten away like devouring a dark chocolate bar. We can wish for time to go quickly or slowly. The young kid wanting to be older and the old man wanting to be younger. The wizened ones learn to be as young as the next day.

 On rare occasion and unbeknownst to me, I have been surreptitiously slipped a marijuana cigarette, which I puffed on once or twice. Now, you wanna talk about time out of my mind? Earlier is later and later is earlier and the next thing you know, you are watching reruns of The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling is bald, but that’s another story.

 On Larry’s Somewhere Under the Rainbow Motorcycle Adventure, detailed extensively on the blog, beginning April 15^th, I experience an endless variety of traveling time. When I was cruising on the bike, with Rhapsody in Blue blasting, time was suspended and it didn’t matter. I remember the coast of Oregon on my right, slowly heading back to San Francisco and not caring about time at all.  My heart stopped as I seemingly crawled around the endless surprise curves of Highway 1, often with an anxious logging truck right behind me, looking to eat up the road with me on it. My first night in San Francisco, the day before the ride, I didn’t think I could make it through 16 non-stop days on my rented Harley tugboat.  I was overwhelmed by the tonnage of time.

 I think the arc of time historically has only been moving in one direction. The first time one of our prehistoric relatives ran from one cave to the next with a message, the clock began its race. The Pony Express and telegraph were slightly later examples of the inevitable quickening we are now dealing with.

 The increasing speed of communication and the rise of technology are the drivers behind both the perception and the possibility of time moving faster. A great example of the real side is Stanley Kubrick’s  “ 2001 Space Odyssey”, where our own creation of artificial intelligence out thinks us because we cannot process information in our heads any faster. Siri can now answer questions within seconds that would take far longer if we had to look them up at the library, only a mere twenty-five years ago. We are already at a point where the technology we have invented is outpacing our ability to deal with its consequences.  Days have been replaced by nano-seconds, too finite a measure for my intellectual comfort zone.

 New technologies spawned the Green Revolution, agriculture’s savior in the form of Genetically Modified Organisms, GMO’s. Big Business and the Federal government moved on this so quickly, there was no time at all set aside for investigating any possible long-term health consequences. The speed at which we are depleting our non-renewable resources is astounding and the consequences will be devastating.  We are moving quickly because we can and the vanity of intellect doesn’t concern itself with consequences, let alone ethics.

 So, I can have slow days or fast days, but the Universe is only having faster and faster days and we’re not getting any smarter in order to deal with increased speed.