Clock

Have you ever stared at a clock? Have you ever sat and watched it tick? All it has to do is move the second hand one notch every second, and every now and then it moves the big hand, every now and then it moves the little hand too, and that's it. That's all it knows. If it keeps doing that consistently, it's a good clock, and if not, it's a bad one.

It's such a simple thing, but it unknowingly rules our lives. We rush to meet deadlines, to catch our flights, and to make it to class on time. The clock is the all-knowing, all-seeing god that judges every man who missed the 9:35am train to get to work and is now late for his meeting with the regional manager. The clock is the unfeeling, unrelenting slave driver to the student that is rushing to finish a final project that is due at midnight. The clock is the thing that tells us when to wake up in the morning, and when to go to sleep at night. But it has no idea of this power that it has. It just keeps ticking, happily or otherwise, always moving forward and forgetting everything else except when it should move again.

I wish I was a clock. Then I wouldn't have to worry about what time I was actually showing, I would just have to change it. Instead of fretting over how many seconds, minutes, or hours had passed since I started working on my quarterly finance reports, I would just move my hands 1/60th of the circumference of my face. The beauty of it all being that I didn't have to calculate that distance. It would be instinct. My song would be a 'tick' followed by a 'tock' and my dance would be a steady circular walk, a pi based tango for one. But, of course, I wouldn't see any of this, I'm just a clock, keeping time while everyone around me struggles to keep up._



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