Columns - 05 January 2009
If I keep on gaining seconds, I ‘ll soon have enough time
Urban Edge - Cape Times
By Evelyn John Holtzhausen
We ought, all, I believe, be happy this year. After all we are gaining one second. One second more to do all those things everyone wants us to do immediately, if not sooner. And there I was going grey about the beard, getting creaky in the joints, looking up lumbago on the internet and contemplating my impending dotage when suddenly one whole new second's worth of life.
At one second a year, in sixty years I will have that one minute I need to fulfil the promise that I will get around to it in a minute. So this is going to be a good year - thanks to digital clocks which need that extra a time to remain accurate. One second may not sound a lot but time, in any case, as I am beginning to understand, is just an illusion.
Consider this: Sitting in a camping chair on this side of the Gariep River, on a trip late last year into the Richtersvelt, I saw movement in the reeds on the riverbank across the muddy waters in Namibia. It was a Namibian shepherd and his dogs. The dogs were having a wonderful time plunging into the river, clambering onto the riverbank and shaking themselves dry before diving in again while the shepherd’s goats munched their way contently along the bank.
All the shepherd, dressed in thread-bare clothes, carried with him was a stick and there he was miles from nowhere enjoying his day to the hilt as were his dogs judging by the fun they were having dipping in and out of the water away from the drumming of the sun in the desert just behind them.
It took little imagination to travel back in time to thinking that little had changed in the manner that this modern day shepherd lived his day compared to, say, a shepherd in biblical times.
Meanwhile, in the same time on our side of the river, as happy as he, we bristled with the trappings of our time. We had 4x4s, satellite tracing devices, radios, iPods, cell phones, solar water heaters, blow-up mattresses (albeit one leaky one!), binoculars, fridges, stoves, gas bottles, tents, sleeping bags, a hairdryer (yes, a battery-powered hairdryer) sand mats and almost everything else money could buy from the toys-r-us that camping today demands of every well-equipped camper.
Yet we were in the same time as the nomad shepherd across the river. For him, time is measured in the phases of the moon, the seasons and, I guess, his progression from child to adult to tribal elder. Then a few weeks ago I saw in the Cape Times a photograph of a woman in Zimbabwe I think it was, drawing water from a well using a chipped plastic cup attached to a piece of string.
This at the same time that scientists in America, also looking for water — as a clue to the existence life — are downloading and studying photographs of the surface of Mars. So whether time is just an illusion or not, all we can know is that we are all living in the same time, at the same time until we die— then we are dead. (in no time at all it seems!) The good news remains however that this year we gained one second. And that, given the predictions about the year ahead, is at least positive.
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