LIFE SLICED AND DICED

Tick-Tock Alarm Clock

For most of us folks that work for a living, life has to have structure for survival.  We need to wake up at a certain time each morning, arrive at work at a certain time, go to lunch at a certain time, go home at a certain time and retire at a certain time so that we have an adequate amount of sleep time to be rested enough to repeat these times the following day.  The work day is sliced and diced according to meetings, deadlines, school bells, etc.  I have to believe that our ancestors probably lived as the creatures they hunted for survival with the rising and setting of the sun every day after day, after day, after day.  There was no need for clocks or calendars when every day simply revolved around survival for that day, after day, after day.

We still struggle for survival, but it’s not on such a short lease in modern culture for most of us.  We generally have free time for weekends, holidays, vacations and even retirement if we make it that far to the finish line.  It sometimes makes one wonder which period of human evolution was the least stressful?  Calendars and Day Planners dictate our day’s activities while the ubiquitous clocks in our lives slice and dice the days into segments of deadlines with stop and go demands on our life hours within the hourglasses of our brief time on the planet.

Peter Pan is a fictional boy who refuses to grow up and travels to Neverland where there are many suns and moons which makes telling time very difficult.  One way to tell time there is to find the iconic crocodile Tick-Tock who accidently swallowed an alarm clock and then wait until it strikes the hour.  Every time Captain Hook hears a clock ticking, he realizes that time is about to devour him!  But there are some who believe time is irrelevant in Neverland and children never grow up there.  Time is actually a human construct, so that we’re never late for anything, but it can also render us slaves to it.

It's admittedly difficult to actually stop the Merry-Go-Round of life and jump off long enough to indulge ourselves with some much-needed downtime to recharge and refuel, but we must for our own sanity and that of those around us.  And we must remain ever vigilant and be aware of the threat of the relentless man-made life structures such as calendars and clocks that slice and dice our lives in the Veg-O-Matic hourglass of life so that we’re never made whole again.