Time—I see it not, I feel it not: it is but a shadowy name—a succession of breathings measured forth by night by the clank of a bell, by day by a shadow crossing along a dialstone. We never know how high we are until we are called to rise; and then, if we are true to plan, our statures touch the skies. The heroism we recite would be a daily thing, did not ourselves the cubits warp for gear to be a king. If we look out of a window in Winter, we might see millions of identical snowflakes cavorting by. However, if we took a magnifying glass and looked at the flakes separately, we would soon discover that they were not identical—in fact, that each had a shape no other flake duplicated exactly. The same is true of human beings. We can tell quite a lot about what Reese will experience just by the fact that she is human. We can tell even more by knowing she is an American girl, living in a certain specific community, with parents of such and such occupation. There is never time to say our last work—the last work of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. However, after everything is said and done, knowing all the external parameters will not allow us to predict what Reese’s life will be like. Not only because random chance might throw all bets off, but more importantly, because Reese has her own mind with which she can either decide to squander her opportunities, or conversely overtake advantage of the gift of being alive and make a success out of herself. Gaining time is gaining everything in love, trade, and politics.  

 It is because of this flexibility of human consciousness that we are not able to know how a person will react and respond, at all times. If everything was determined by the common human condition, by social and cultural categories, and by chance, it would be useless to reflect on ways to make one’s life excellent. Fortunately, there is enough room for personal initiative and choice to make a real difference. And those who believe this are the ones with the best chance to break free from the grip of fate. To live means to experience—through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the official scare resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore, one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one’s time is allocated or invested. There is no difference between Time and of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. Of course, how we invest time is not our decision alone to make. Stringent constraints dictate what we should do either as members of the human race, or because we belong to a certain culture and society. Nevertheless, there is room for personal choices, and control over time is to a certain extent in our hands. Time is the mightiest mason of all. And a tutor, and a counselor, and a physician, and a scribe, and a poet, and a deacon, and a king. If you knew Time as well as I do, you would not talk about wasting it. It is him. [Ancient monuments] are gone. Time has lasted too long for them. For why? Time was made by the Lord, and they were made by man.

Even in the most oppressive decades of the Industrial Revolution, when workers slaved away for more than eighty hours a well in mines and factories, there were some who spent their precious free hours in literary pursuits or political action instead of following the majority to the pubs. When we are most acutely sensible of the shortness of life? When do we consult our watches in perpetual dread of the result? When does the night steal on us unawares, and the morning take us by surprise? When we are going on a journey. The terms we use in talking about time—budgeting, investing, allocating, wasting—are borrowed from the business and economic language. Consequently, some people claim that our attitude toward time is colored by our peculiar capitalist heritage. It is true that the maxim “Time is money” was a favourite of that great apologist of capitalism, Benjamin Franklin, but the equation of the two terms is certainly much older, and rooted in the common human experience, rather than in our culture alone.  In fact, it could be rationally stated that it is money that gets its value from time, rather than the other way around. Money is simply the most generally used counter for measuring the time invested in doing or making Something. And we value money because to a certain extent, it liberates us from the constraints of life by making it possible to have free time to do in it what we want. For each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy. For each beloved hour sharp pittances of years, bitter contested farthings and coffers heaped with tears.