About Time

October 9 2023, 1:00 PM, CBC ended broadcast of the official time signal. The beginning of the long dash marks progress through the past 84 years, with me listening for 82½ of them, when not too busy taking care of business. Now it's over. Time stops while I consider the implications.

This note is about time. Since time is rather abstract, I do what others have done and imagine time as a journey so it's easier to think about. 

If that doesn't make sense, consider the timeline at the bottom of this Youtube video, which has a spot on it representing the moment being viewed. You can drag the spot to cue the video to any time you like. The spot moving on the line is a useful, if inexact, analogy for our journey through time, although it is interrupted by commercials, and there are other discrepancies.

Time goes one way. You can go back in a video or a story or a photo album or imagination, but not in this version of reality. What's done is done.

Time ticks along at a steady pace, but as we perceive it, it seems to speed up or slow down depending on what's happening. Time flies when you are having fun. A hard day's work seems to last forever. Twenty-six years of retirement is gone in a flash, as I am the witness.

Time is cyclical, days or years or generations repeating predictably so we use the past to foretell the future. But the future vanishes in fog because what comes next is not just what came before since it depends on accidents, butterflies and choices. The journey is more like a spiral than a circle, or like finding your way through a maze with lots of dead ends rather than a straight line.

It's like this.

If provinces assert independence from Canada and then are absorbed by the United States because they need protection from Russia, don't be surprised. 

If spring is silent because all the arable land is monocropped and poisoned to improve yield, and the only birds remaining are raised in cages until they wind up in the pot, don't be surprised.

If the chickens succumb to virus and there's nothing left in the cupboard but a few cans of Soylent Green, don't be surprised.

If a fiver won't buy a coffee and a muffin because the soil is exhausted and nothing grows but dandelions, don't be surprised.

If the neighbourhood gets flooded and baked and burned over and blown away, and we wind up in a burrow in a hillside eating dry grass and the odd cricket when we can find one, don't be surprised.

If we keep on burning carbon and the world becomes hotter and more precarious until civilization collapses in a destructive orgy of people looking out for themselves, don't be surprised. 

If we choose respect for the global ecosystem, and I stop writing about climate change because everybody knows what's been happening and we are all doing our best to stop the damage, don't be surprised. 

It's about accidents,
butterflies,
and choices.

I hear the end of the long dash.

Hey Siri, what time is it? I want to take a nap.

It's about time to clean up your mess.
No napping.

If AI advances to the point where we take orders from Siri because we aren't wise enough to survive on our own, don't be surprised.