From a Minute to a Century

Today is the last Sunday of summer. Summer gone. Another one bites the dust. A shout out to Queen. It’s got me thinking about time and how fast it is moving.

We have minutes, hours, days, weeks months, years, decades and centuries. I find it interesting how each of those measurements take precedence at different parts of our lives. Think of a birth. Those first few minutes are so important. Push, Mom! Cut the cord, Dad! Make sure the baby is breathing. Minutes go by and we go from our home in the womb to our place in this big, wonderful world.

How many hours did we nap as an infant. That was important then. How many hours since the last poop. That was important too. Can parents of an infant get eight hours of sleep? Well, maybe one of them can. For the other, each hour of sleep is like a Godsend. We count in hours because hours are more important then.

Days become more important once we start school. Is it Friday yet? A holiday means only four days of school this week. Only eight days until we have to give the speech in English class. Thirteen days until the prom. Twenty two days until graduation.

We enter the workforce and suddenly weeks are key. I get two weeks vacation! We call it a work week. It’s how we measure our time. That big report is due in three weeks. Months take precedence when we begin to start a family. How many months pregnant are you? The baby is how many months old. Vacation time comes in the summer months, because the kids are out of school.

Years are always important. It is how we measure our time on Earth. A year is one trip around the sun. We mark the end of each year with a celebration. We made it through another year. I hope it wasn’t the year of living dangerously, unless you like that sort of thing.

We don’t usually think about decades until we are older and start looking back. I was born in the 50s but came of age in the 60s, the swinging 60s. There was the me decade in the 70s, the roaring 20s, and the gay 90s (1890).

That leaves the century. Centuries are for the historians to worry about. The 20th century was dubbed “the American Century”, probably by American historians. There is one way we think about a century on a personal level. Will I live a hundred years? It’s possible, but unlikely. I had an aunt reach 100 and died a few days later. I don’t expect to live a century. I eat way too many sweets! My hope is that all of the Tastycakes I have eaten only take about a decade off my life. I would like to see 90! How about you?

Enjoy every minute and every hour of this day! Like the Moody Blues sang, back in the 60s, we only get 22,000 days! That’s 31,680,000 minutes. But who’s counting?