The weight of this sad time we must obey,


Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.


The oldest have borne most; we that are young
 Shall

never see so much, nor live so long.

Duke of Albany, Lear, V

This quote allows me an entrance to speaking of old people ending their days. Possibly an ironic observation to be made by me at my current age of record. (“But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”) It strikes me, though, that we certainly do observe our elders, maybe because we instinctively doubt that we’ve managed to know quite enough to measure our own time. And we have been given more of it. I, for example, was told when very young by my mother that one of my major flaws was to procrastinate. Why I needed to be told that I no longer remember, and I do think she was right….I’ve long become famous for procrastinating. Who isn’t? We all have time on our hands, and we all feel time slipping away, and we all have bouts when we waste our time or even more deliberately imagine we have unlimited amounts of it. At my current age I seem more aware of expressions made about time. Many expressions I’ve often heard said aloud are ideas about spoonfuls of time.

Have you got a minute?  I’ll do it in a few minutes.     Five minutes more. Could you do it quick-like? This    will only take a minute.  I’ll do it,  A.S.A.P.  Of course    I’ll do it, just as soon as I can get around to it.” 

Each of these makes a judgment that something will happen soon, but before it does, there will be a slight hesitation or pause. I’d guess that younger readers are not surprised that I am more sensitive about time than they. It is easy to acknowledge that I would be. Equally, because I am not actively employed, I find myself apt to make conversations longer than those in the functioning work force do. The retired guy’s plight is that he begins a story, and if paying attention notices that his listener is impatient for it to end. There’s that word again: impatient.
So it is likely to find that age finds us with both ends of a time-spectrum to be in play. Age slows us, and we have literally less of it left in the bank. How can we adjust to both qualities of time at once? We have luckily been given time to do as we will, time is no longer “money” as the saying goes. What catches our attention is commonly mixed with previous experience. That is to say an event or detail is another way of launching into: “this reminds me of a story.” i.e. The current moment, question, or object, takes us back.
In this case I really mean….. back. Greece, prior to Aristotle and Plato, is where a fella named Heraclitus ( 500B.C.) spoke of time as a metaphor. Two specific ones: “It is not possible to step into the same river twice” and “Time is a strung bow in a continual tug of war.”(strung in tension, sprung when released). With time in this discussion we are moved beyond simple logic. Heraclitus with the strung bow makes time into an equilibrium. A strung bow in this case is not the object but a moment held in space. Indeed the last words I remember my dear mother saying in hospital and while critically ill was how very tired she was to be told that the ice water she longed for would be gotten for her, ‘in a few minutes.” Powerful isn’t it? She had almost no time left, but was told she should be patient as the nurse being quite busy would bring these desired ice chips and water in just a few minutes. Just imagine how long those minutes seemed to her. How deservedly impatient she was.