C.G.Ayling

Tag: time

  • on Tricks, with Time

    The most fundamental reward of love given, is how often love is returned.

    I wonder why it takes us so long to learn lessons like this?  Such are the lessons of life, simple lessons some seem destined never to learn at all.  Sadly I think this lack of learning of life’s most fundamental lessons is more widespread now than it ever has been before.

    Why? Because of tricks played with time…

    First, we are tricked into thinking we have no time.  Then we’re tricked into selling what little time we do have, for inadequate reward.  Then, because of the inadequate rewards granted by the second trick, we’re tricked again into taking precious time from those we love and literally giving still more of it to corporations that simply do not care.  We’re tricked into leading such ridiculously “busy” lives we find we lack time to think about the things that really matter.

    Those things we’re tricked into believing we don’t have time to think about aren’t really things at all… they’re people, and living beings, and life, and love, and liberty, and happiness, and truth, and so much more.  They’re the essential things that make life worth living.  Unfortunately not one of them is something which the money we get in inadequate exchange for our precious time will ever allow us to buy.

    Everyone should know the true reward of love given is love returned.  If you’re reading my blog, or my books, or my tweets you already know that without needing anyone to tell you.  You know beyond any doubt that love’s reward is love’s return.

    Now I ask you this question.  What is the reward of money?

    The answer is simple – the reward of money exchanged, is things.

    Too bad those tangible things we receive in exchange for money aren’t any of the things that make life worth living.  Why?  Because only love buys those.

    Perhaps the skeptics might gleefully ask, “But what is the reward of money retained?”  I have an answer for that as well.  It is a hoard. Now there’s a fascinating word – hoard.  Look it up to refresh or fix its meaning in your mind – I think you’ll find hoards are generally rather selfish things. {Generally…}

  • on Moments, Misspent

    Reflecting on how we spend our lives has brought me to the conclusion we are no longer spending time wisely.

    Life is a purse full of coin we’re granted at birth, but the coins aren’t cash, they’re moments and we have no idea how many we get.  Our purse can and will run out, all too often when we least expect it. Nothing we do replenishes our purse, so we should spend our moments wisely.

    We don’t…

    We reach into the purse of our life, take out the coins and squander them on things that ultimately don’t matter. Work won’t remember us, while those we love and who love us in return will. Yet we spend our most precious and productive moments on work and have so few left to give the ones we love.

    Why do you work?  To secure the daily needs of your loved ones, or to secure your legacy? There is a problem if it is the latter, that problem is the same one I mentioned in a previous paragraph. Your loved ones will remember you with love, your legacy might make your name remembered but it will never love you.

    Perhaps the most important thing we should do with our time is constantly re-evaluate how we spend it?  When you do, please remember time isn’t an investment capable of earning the most precious things any of us have – our moments.

    ~ Time ~
    ~
    When there aren’t enough hours in
    the days.
    When work takes our time and fritters
    it away.
    When we no longer have moments left
    for play.
    Hours spent, for what?
    To let us give to work
    all the energy we’ve got?
    Hours stolen from living,
    in payment for a chance
    at life.
    ~

  • on Time

    If you’re like me you wonder about things, a lot.  You think about strange things, silly things, mundane things, and things that really matter.  One of the stranger things I’ve wondered about for years, which have become decades {no exaggeration}, is the nature of Time.

    I recently posted this comment on Twitter, in response to a question on the nature of Eternity.

    Can linear beings comprehend cycles which neither begin, nor end?

    The following are a few of my thoughts on Time, taken from an even more recent conversation in which I was asked to explain how I can believe that time does not exist.

    What is time… if it can be measured but cannot not be modified then can it even be?

    Life is a linear construct in a cyclic universe. Universal cycles do not have a beginning and an ending, they are perpetual.  Yet life has a beginning and an end, and our way of grasping how we transition through our beginning to our end is to measure something that does not exist.  We create numbers that are quite literally meaningless when compared to the scale of our existence.  What difference does it make if another solar system is 10 million light years away, or 100 million when such scales are compared to a lifetime of 100 years?  All 100 years is, is a measure of the life of a linear being who needs measurements to comfort itself that it means something on the cosmic scale.

    Yet why do we even need scales?  We have souls, and our souls are not bound by time.

    {P.S. In case you’re interested in some of my other thoughts on time, here are some other posts on the subject:-
    “Streams of time”
    “Perceptions, of Time”
    “on Now“}

  • Wrought, of Stone

    ~ Wrought, of Stone ~
    ~
    Modern buildings wrought
    by man and so quickly sold
    no longer last as do the
    ancient structures
    of old.
    What differs?
    The builders,
    or the sand
    they cast into transient,
    impermanent stone?
    ~
    Humanity’s efforts to better nature
    are misguided at best,
    and soon fail before Time’s tests.
    All humanity has ever built is doomed
    for Nature will once more take
    its rightful place,
    and from earth’s cruelly scarred face,
    of us,
    every single sorry trace
    erase.
    ~
    Is all of humanity
    already doomed to return into the
    dust
    from whence we came?
    Only Time will tell,
    but will we be here
    to listen when Time
    tells her tales?
    ~

    modern efforts dwindling to dust.
    modern efforts dwindling to dust.

  • immaterial

    ~ immaterial… ~
    ~
    Reach out and touch me,
    with other than your words,
    you can’t
    for I am not there.
    Though my heart is real,
    my spirit is not made of matter,
    my spirit
    is immaterial.
    Material things do not matter
    to me,
    at least as much as they matter
    to many.
    I
    am immaterial.
    ~

    Time never stops, and it never changes.

    Time is like a stream we flow through.

    Is all we really are ripples in time’s flow?

  • Streams, of Time

    Time is an interesting thing.  We spend it without consideration.  We mistakenly think we’re investing time, yet for what return? The reward of time spent is never time gained. Time, something we can never replenish, seeps from our grasp, until we run out, at last.

    In the past I thought love might be the fuel on which souls operate, but I now see this is likely incorrect. Love is the product of souls, not the fuel they consume. Soul fuel is time, and time is finite.

    Time is like a river flowing by, we can sit idle on its bank, or we can dive in and swim with its flow. Idle spectator, or active participant, in the question of our time only we may make that choice.

    Likewise is time in separate streams.  We have clocks with which we measure it, and those clocks compensate for time differences between disparate parts of this infinitesimally small place we so arrogantly term, “our world”. Yet our clocks cannot combine two time streams into a river, or a myriad time streams into an ocean. Only Fate, an instrument of the universe can accomplish that.

    Sometimes Fate is as a cruel blade, cutting us away from the ones we love. And sometimes Fate is a threaded needle that sows together timelines that once were separate.

    Are we the masters of our destiny, or is destiny the ultimate master of us all? For you, the only one that should decide that, is you.

    As these thoughts pass through my mind, prompted by the difference in the timelines of myself and those most precious to me, I find myself hoping Fate might assume its role as needle, and thread our timelines together.

    Just a hope, but hope springs eternal, or so someone said.

    Your swimming companion, in another stream.

  • Perceptions, of Time.

    Time is something which fascinates me.  You see I don’t believe time actually exists.  Yes, we have mechanisms to measure this “thing” very precisely.  Almost everything we do is somehow tied to time.  Yet there is nothing we can do to change it.

    Here is an interesting mental problem.  If we could travel faster than the speed of light and we travelled away from the earth while training an infinitely powerful telescope upon it, we would witness events that happened in the past.  In a manner of speaking, or thinking, we would be “overtaking the past” or travelling “back in time”.

    Now what would happen if we did this for a year, then turned around and raced back toward the earth, still faster than the speed of light?  When we turned around wouldn’t we be a year in the past?  Or, would a year have passed?