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“Time,” Plutarch wrote,” is the wisest of all counselors.” For those who have learned the oppression of
wealth through the lessons of deprivation, for those who have learned the real treasures of life by
losing its trinkets, for those who have come, finally, to understand what once they only knew, the
insight speaks clearly of the purpose and the process of time. No amount of naïveté survives impervious
to the gradual unfolding of the meanings that outlast experience. The dullest moments of our lives are
liable to illumination if we live long enough.

But time has another dimension to it as well. Where achievement and motion are qualities of a culture,
time is a commodity. We have objectified time and packaged it, and made it seem to be itself a thing.
We put it on watches and calendars and schedules. We make wise remarks about “losing” it and
“wasting” it and “spending” it and “killing” it. As good capitalists and poor poets, we use the same
verbs to talk about time as we do to talk about money: we “save” time and “count” time and “invest”
time. And so perhaps, we forget, too often, to savor time, to enjoy time, to trust time. All time. Instead
we fill it and wrench it; we race against it and fight it; we make it enemy instead of friend. And so, we
lose it.

In the light of these two truths about time—that time teaches and time disappears—the purpose of time
rings chasteningly clear. The purpose of time is not accumulation. The purpose of time is to alert us to
ourselves so that we can become the one thing it is really worth our time to be: a totally human,
deeply spiritual human being.

Steven Vincent Benet wrote, “Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging
day, in all the thousands of small uncaring ways.” Real spirituality demands that we care enough about
all the moments of life to live well both our reason and our faith. “Time,” the wag wrote on the wall, “is
nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at once.” (Maybe all the philosophy in the world
was graffiti once upon a time. If not, at least this graffiti qualifies as high philosophy.)

A sense of time awakens us to the truth of the temporal in the spiritual development of a person. Time
carries us from situation to situation in life, one by one, until eventually we have lived them all. The
measure of a life, however, is not whether we have spent our particular number of allotted days. The
measure is how we have lived them. We can choose to keep pace with the cadence it requires of us or
we can resist it all the way to the bitter end. We can learn from it or reject it completely. There is
only one thing we cannot do in life: we cannot ignore its lessons.