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Time is King
posted Monday, 8 May 2006
Isn’t it amazing the way time can play tricks on you? Have you ever sat in a classroom or a meeting and just felt that the clock was taunting you? Conversely, haven’t you ever been in a situation where the time sped past because you were enjoying the activity so much? Rare is the man or woman who seems satisfied with the passage of time, as if since we created our sundials and calendars, we can control it.
How would it be if we didn’t have clocks? How was it?
“I’ll meet you at Starbucks at high noon.”
“When the shadow is longer than the stick I’ll depart.”
“I’m being deployed to Iraq for 365 moons.”
Time can be seen as both a curse and a blessing, then. When you want something to last forever, your mind perceives it as going by faster, such as a song you love, the life of someone you care for or depend on, a good book, childhood, a cruise to the Caribbean.
And when you want something to end, oh man the time simply lags, like your morning commute in traffic, the mother of all meetings, a deployment to Iraq, the time spent waiting for results from your mammogram.
The mechanisms inside the clock aren’t wrong. They’re pretty much constant. The cycles of sun, moon, tide, and season are not false. They rule our lives.
Out here in the desert, Time is King; the minutes are his minions, and the months sabers by which you are knighted. The King controls all that you do, when you come and go, and how long until you see your children. Every mission and order is based on a strict time schedule. We are deployed for a year “boots on the ground,” so 365 becomes a mystical combination of integers, a mantra, a prayer.
We are nothing more than Australopithecus in tailored suits or combat boots. From the geographical perspective, humankind’s time on this earth is less than the blink of an eye. Plate tectonics dismiss us. Volcanoes are too wise to notice our antics.
We study anthropology even as we live within it. We fly and drive and move around this planet, on these continents; we live and we fight. We are caricatures of ourselves, cartoon nations embroiled in our own global struggles. The mountains fold their arms and they watch. We used to fight for food or a mate. Now we fight for freedom or money.
When you find yourself as a soldier in Iraq, equipped with some of the finest tools in your hands, which are the modern equivalents to stone and flint, a rock swung from a stick to snare the hunted, you can’t help it, you count the days. It’s like a reflexive reaction. Hit my knee with a rubber mallet.
You track the hours, the seconds, and the months.
X amount of Sundays left. X amount of weeks. I will eat in this chow hall x many more times. This many times I will lie in this bed and stare at this ceiling. The cracks my eyes trace there have become like wallpaper in the home you grew up in – you don’t even notice it anymore, you just cast your thoughts upon its patterns and let them roam free.
And you act as if, just because you’re in the desert and the sights and sounds become so surreal, and you’ve forgotten what America smells like at 9:00 in the morning as you walk past your neighbor’s garden or the bakery on the corner, that the possibility and difficulty of life is a finite thing, while your true path lay spread before you like a virtual chess board.
Pawn or King? Bishop or Rook? Should I move forward slowly, or attack my fate with a flank?
“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” Emily Dickinson
Leave comments for Captain K here: (2)
1. Janet left...
Saturday, 13 May 2006 7:05 am
I have often thought that I have read the best that you have in you and
then I read again and know that just as time is infinite in the grand
scheme of things, so is the talent that was alotted to one Lieutenant K
before your time on earth began.
2. Soldiers Angel CJ left...
Monday, 15 May 2006 11:30 am
Hope time moves quickly for you! =)Be safe.