Before thinking about what role time has played and will play in my life, I had to establish exactly what the word time means to me. Simply put, if I were instructed to blurt out the first three words that come to mind when I hear the word time, I would most likely say: clock, class, and slow. That is, I had always thought of time as merely a fact. After some of the reading and thinking that we have done in this class, I’ve realized that time can and should be thought of as a controllable force as well as a fact. This concept has an ever-changing presence and role in our lives. To me, the easiest way to imagine time as a force is to picture a person’s life, split into several stages. First is infancy, followed by childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and finally old age.
It would be impossible to talk about my own infancy, so we must look upon a hypothetical life to begin. Time is simplest for infants. They wake up, eat, cry, laugh and go back to sleep. Therefore, it’s easy for us to say that other than moving through it, and therefore it simply being a fact of life, time doesn’t necessarily have another meaning for infants.
Moving on to childhood, I am able to use my own life to analyze the importance of time. As a child, our lives are shaped and structured by time; time controlled by someone else. From the time I began going to school, having play dates and engaging in extracurricular activities, there has always been some kind of time-related pressure in my life. I was constantly being told where I had to be and what I had to do by a certain time. Whether it was waking up for school, doing my homework, or being in bed at my curfew, I was always subject to someone else’s concept of time. Especially in high school, if I were to miss first period of the school day or be late for my curfew on a weekend night, I would have gotten in serious trouble. This was all a result of my life being governed by my reliance on my parents’ force of time, and the way they required timeliness while raising me. All of this changed once I got to college.
Even though the next phase of my life, young adulthood, has just begun, I have already gotten a taste of what is to come. In the first three weeks of being at Richmond, my life has shifted from my time being managed externally, to being in a position where I have the ability to develop my own concept of time. I am incredibly happy to have the independence that comes along with the college experience, and the only way to showcase this is to re-tell my first day of classes. In short, I got back to my room after my last class, and purely out of instinct sat down at my desk and pulled out my books as if I were doing my homework. It didn’t hit me until my roommate asked me if I wanted to go play basketball and get some dinner: I didn’t HAVE to do my homework as soon as I got back. Looking back, I probably should have, but the fact still remains that instead of time controlling my life, I now have almost complete control over time. I can wake up whenever I want to (as long as I don’t have a class) and eat whenever I want to, among many others.
So far, I have seen an enormous changeover from my time being structured and supervised by others, to having almost complete control over my time when it comes to every day actions. The next change happens when one becomes an adult. Perhaps adulthood begins when one becomes responsible for structuring someone else’s time, however I would like to use parenting as my example. In the future, when, assuming I am a parent, I will inherit the responsibility of not only controlling my own time, but also supervising my kid’s time just like my parents did when I was growing up.
The last transition in a persons’ life regarding time would be the movement into the later years of life. Just before I left New York for Virginia, I talked to my grandfather, who is 94. My grandfather worked every day of his adult life until very recently. His concept of time has to change again as he enters old age in his mind and he is struggling with that because his concept of time has always been to utilize, maximize, and manage it as well as he could. He now has to redefine his concept of time as his days are less busy, his time is becoming less managed by his adult life and he is becoming less responsible for other people’s times. Our lives are shaped and governed by time, but the concept of time means different things and carries different burdens at different times of our lives. To me, it seems important to understand the role that time has in our lives, so that we don’t waste what is a finite and precious commodity.