Time for a New Year

This is the time of the year when we review the past and look forward to the future.   

Written about in song and poetry, time marches relentlessly to some unknown point or place or end that…who knows?  We relate to the spread of time through past, present and future or yesterday, today and tomorrow.  Our view of it is mostly forward looking unless, of course, you are a historian.  Time in the future is forecasts, predictions, and horoscopes.  It is hopes, dreams and plans.  Time in the present is now, fleeting, ephemeral.  It is deadlines.  We say we’d like to live in the moment, to be present.  Time in the past is memories, experiences and history.  We learn from the past.   

“Yesterday is history.  Tomorrow is a mystery.  Today is a gift.  That’s why they call it the present,” goes the popular saying.            

Time on Earth is measured in time zones marking the passage of the sun across lines of longitude on a spinning, tilting and wobbling globe.  Only time enjoys all the future.  It existed long before and will exist long after humankind.  Our universe is thought to be about 13.75 billion years old and is still expanding from the singularity also known as the Big Bang.  Our earth is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old or older, some say. 

From Threes, Chapter Three, “Threes in Science”