Watching Kettles

Watching Kettles

Time has become a fascination for me; nay an obsession even.  As I seem to hurtle through my autumn years it seems to be accelerating.  The clock ticks with metronomic accuracy. Atomic clocks achieve a degree of precision that compares with my wristwatch as Usain Bolt to two five year olds in a three legged race.

I am more confused than ever about time itself.  What is it actually all about?  Why indeed does a watched kettle never boil (of course it does, but it’s our perception that is affected)? I love the various expressions that relate to time.  Most do seem to ring true; my favourite being ‘doesn't’t time fly when you are having fun’ and it truly does seem to have a different scale.

My recent late arrival on the amateur astronomy and cosmology scene has been a mind-boggling one.  For every fact I learn, my limited understanding asks a hundred other questions.  It would almost seem to me that to really gain a grip understanding-wise, one has to be extremely accomplished at maths and possess an unconventional perception of not only what is, but what is possible.

My life had a beginning and will have an end.  This is (pardon the pun) a universal truth…or is it?  Matrix-like theories abound about the true birth, existence and even death of time itself.  Yet my mind and I suspect many others cannot imagine time not existing.  After all, what takes its place?

I first began thinking about beginnings and ends as a small child because my world was made up of them.  Indeed they still rule my life.  So to try and conceive such a finite and neat answer is indeed a ‘time-wasting’ folly.  Even such learned scientists as Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking who offer so much are at times guessing.   I watched the former present a TV programme in which the presenter seemed to point out a trail that stared with the ‘Big Bang’ and end with the lights simply ‘going out’ as it were.

I have no idea why these things have become so important to me at my grand age of sixty one.  Perhaps it is because I don’t have as much time left as I had in my endless childhood days, but one thing I do know… I’ve had enough of getting dizzy thinking.

I’m off to put the kettle on…