Here Comes Treble: It's A Puzzle
Isabel Bradley writes about that most elusive quantity - time.
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Trevor sat opposite me, chatting idly, then looked up at the clock on the wall. “Good heavens!” he said, “is that the time already! I don’t know where it goes… I spend the day doing so much, but when it’s time to go to bed, I look back, and just don’t know what I’ve achieved, or where the hours have gone. So distressing, really. Sorry, my dear, I must go, goodbye!”
As he rushed out of the office, I felt a poem coming on:
Time
By Isabel Bradley ©
Such insubstantial stuff
Is Time.
One moment, it’s there –
In plenty!
The next,
I’m standing in a puddle of it,
Puzzled,
At the end of the day,
Wondering how it
Melted …
Away …
We’ve all experienced those moments that seem to stretch on forever, giving us time to do everything that’s needed. At these moments, we look at our watches, and gasp in amazement when only fifteen minutes have passed. Given the amount of work we’ve achieved, it should really have been an hour – shouldn’t it? Gazing at a green traffic light that should, by rights, turn amber then red at any moment, long before we reach it, we’ve willed it to stay green, and it has. Or has time merely ‘stretched’ to allow us to cross safely?
The opposite, of course, is true. When we’re convinced that there’ll never be enough time to get through all we have to, despairing of meeting a deadline – isn’t that when everything compresses into just a few moments, we work and work, everything seems to go in slow motion - and time flies past, before we know it, that deadline’s been missed, it’s taken hours to do what should have been finished in half the time.
Time is elusive. We try to define it, but somehow, as if laughing at us, it slips through everyone’s understanding.
Until next ‘time’… ‘here comes Treble!
By Isabel Bradley copyright reserved ©
