Time is elastic. Time passes without a doubt, but how fast it passes is all in our perception. It can pass slowly and quickly at the same time. There might be a week in which you have to do something that you hate. The time will drag as you look forward to the end of each day. Yet, at the same time, you can reflect on how fast the years are going by. It's a common experience to believe that time goes faster as you get older, yet science would show no change in the speed of a clock.

We can't conceive of the vastness of time. A great difficulty in accommodating ourselves to a finite world is our concentration on the immediate. Reflect that all life on Earth has come from a common ancestor, that whales, worms and man are all relatives and that all the differentiation and complexity of life has come as a result of the passage of time. Then consider that for as long as there has been written history, hundreds of human generations, there has been almost no observable change in the plants and animals we know today. Given enough time, almost anything can develop in nature, but not normally within a human lifetime.

We are impatient creatures. We want things and we want them now. We cannot wait even long enough to earn enough money to buy our material desires, but take on debt and the restrictions on our future that it implies, in order to have things immediately. We think nothing of destroying plants and animals that represent millions upon millions of years of biological development in order to have immediate material satisfaction. Does it really bother us that species are under threat because of the desires of creatures who are gone in less than one hundred years? If we could appreciate time as we do material wealth, we would be aghast at what we are doing, particularly since, as far as we know, Earth is the only repository of life in the universe.

The economic system we have developed demands rapid change and it creates an environment of stress and uncertainty where we have to run on a daily basis. To live life at 12 miles an hour means to reconsider the importance of time in a way other than that it is money. Instead of considering a life on the basis of how much was has in comparison to how much one could have, I see a more constructive view in seeing how little one needs in comparison to what one has. In terms of time, if you don't have a hectic schedule, then you have more than enough time to enjoy life. If time seems too short, isn't it because we load it with more than it can bear? Why is it necessary to multi-task and to "manage your time wisely?" At the point of wealth, comfort and efficient production that Americans have reached, we should have far more time for ourselves than any people in history, but not if we continually speed up our lives.

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