The Blank Canvas

Albert Einstein was a very wise man. That fact we all know because countless books speak of his glory and one can hardly read the word “physics” without seeing his name in the next sentence. Though I learned through textbooks and lectures of Einstein’s genius, I didn’t really come to realize it to its fullest extent until a few weeks ago.

I was sitting on the porch, the Florida heat lying heavily on my shoulders. Butterflies and birds flew lazily past me in search of escape from the midday drawl. It seemed as if the world was in a haze—everything was moving in slow motion. The trees’ branches reached for the ground, while the solar rays shooting from the sky beat down upon them. The clouds, like oversized zeppelins, sluggishly crept their way across the stratosphere. Reaching for my icy lemonade, beads of water crawling down the side of the glass, I came to realize something: I can FEEL time.

Photo courtesy of Biobreak.wordpress.com

I looked at the clock hanging on the wall behind me and saw the second hand taunt me with its slow mechanics, creeping its way to each number, counting down the death of the day. My heartbeat joined this deadly dance as it beat the seconds down in my life in time with the tick-tocks in the background. I thought of other times when my heart’s sounds would blur in my ears and my eyes could barely see the second hand swing around that stone-cold face on the wall. Five minutes seemed like one sixtieth of an hour at times, other times, one second felt like one twentieth of an hour. Einstein’s Theory of Relativism was awake in every syncopated move of the hand. Every beat of my heart and every move of the hands on the clock were singing the theory’s verses.

The notion is simple, but brilliant. There are moments in a person’s life when time rushes past in a blur and others when life seems to come to a complete stop. In my life, as I’m sure you’ve felt in yours,  there have been days when I barely notice there is a watch on my wrist counting down the seconds to when I put my head at rest. Then there are others, the periods of weeks and weeks where life monotonously drones by, hour by hour, day by day each day greyer than the next. The blur between them is insignificant and the feeling of night and day has been wiped from my mind. I wake up feeling the deadweight all around me, hanging on my walls, on my wrist, on the clock in Time Square.

I wonder if I could, if I tried, feel the proof of Time—unchanging and unflinching—standing at the sidelines of our life, laughing at the inevitability as we scramble to pick up the seconds scattered on the floor. A facet of life, totally separate of our struggle to make appointments, entirely detached of the yearly ritual of lighting candles and blowing them out, Time is unaffected. Like in a movie theater, the white screen that all movies are projected upon remains as vast a blank canvas as ever, Time is very much the same thing. It is the canvas our lives are projected upon. The dancing colors and vibrant activity of everyday life flicker momentarily on the screen…but as the light fades, what remains is Time. Time sinking into the far reaches of eternity, farther than any of us will ever see.

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