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Absolutely Free Yet Beyond All Price

What do you suppose is the most valuable asset, the most precious commodity on earth?

You might answer diamonds or oil or simply money, or maybe something abstract such as love, power, intelligence or influence. Yet all these are nothing without the one thing that ironically every person is given for free in roughly equal measure.

You have either guessed already or you never will, but the one thing more precious than all else is time.

Your time upon this earth, given freely to you at birth, is extraordinarily limited and grows daily ever more so. Everything about you (in both senses) you can change, but time flows constantly like a great black river, impervious to all your efforts and no amount of wealth or cunning can stop it.

Each day that comes and goes is one day of your time gone forever; one day less remaining in the pot of time you started out with. You can perhaps extend your account a little or make fuller use of what you already have, but that’s it really. Time cannot be bought, browbeaten or bullshitted.

The Value of Wealth

With time you may amass a vast fortune, acquire beautiful objects, love and be loved, but you cannot fabricate time itself, and once yours is all but gone what comfort will money bring you, what use will glittering possessions be?

The only comfort worth having in the end is that of having fulfilled your purpose; of having used your time to do the things you wanted to do. Which rather begs the question, what is your purpose?

There is of course no correct answer; or more accurately there are as many correct answers as there are people prepared to seriously consider the question. There’s no value in dying rich if your life’s aim is to plant a great deciduous forest, but there is good reason to spend much of your life becoming seriously rich if you harbour such an ambition since great forests don’t come cheap.

Wealth is in a real sense quite worthless; it’s why you desire it and what you do with it that provides meaning.

Would you accept a million dollars as the price for having only one day left to live? Me neither. How about a hundred million for a month? Nope, still no deal. I’m not sure there is any price worth accepting in exchange for time, because in essence time defines your life to the extent that the two become inseparable.

Falling For A Time Traveller

Humans have long both craved and feared time. As children we believe we are immortal and treat time with easy insouciance, but as we grow up we begin to resent and fear its uncompromising mastery over us, all the while still yearning for more. This primal relationship with time finds expression is all manner of ways.

Most apparent is procreation; a thinly disguised attempt to slip into the future through our children. It is why human society throughout recorded history has always developed protocols and protections governing the unions between men and women and why we try to instil the best in and pass on all we can to our children.

These are traits a time-traveller from the Stone Age would still recognise in us today. That’s because we are, in effect, time travellers from the Stone Age and beyond, as we in turn seek out the best partner to help us journey on to who knows where.

We like to call it “love” but that’s really what we’re doing - throwing in our lot with whoever we hope might give us a decent chance in a three-legged race to beat time.

That Ghengis Had All The Steppes

Other attempts at immortality are to be found in the things we repeatedly leave behind. Fine art, monuments of all kind, empires of various sorts. Great dynasties are in effect a grand amalgamation of all these various ploys.

Ghengis Khan (perhaps the best known exponent of the great dynasty gambit to cheat time) left behind not only his name, an empire that eventually stretched from the Pacific almost to the Atlantic, and the usual assortment of palaces and trophies, but also an epic genetic legacy.

It has been estimated that a staggering one in every two hundred men alive today are directly descended from Ghengis Khan. None of it could save the man himself though; he died in 1227.

Interestingly, in the course of his life Ghengis Khan dabbled with several religions, principally in order to uncover secrets of immortality. He never found any but he was neither the first or last person to explore this route since an “after life” is precisely what most of the major religions offer their followers in one guise or another. The comforting belief that you can after all outrun time and retire to eternal paradise (or damnation - take your pick).

The origins of religion are rooted in our naturally inquisitive nature. Humans are, so far as anyone has ever determined, the only species on this planet to have evolved structured language, which in turn equips us with a capability for sophisticated abstract thought. We think using language. And so we ask questions such as when will it snow again, where do we go when we die, why were we visited by plague, what’s the damn point of it all?

The trouble is, people don’t much care for the answer “Nobody knows. Yet.” so we construct plausible sounding explanations to fill the void. Voila, religion.

Unfortunately, by the time some bright spark eventually figures out that, for example, plague is spread by fleas from rats, he’s likely to find himself taking on a powerful and entrenched lobby that has a vested interest in maintaining the “Will of God” line.

The Constant Of Time

Whoever first noted that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” didn’t know the half of it. In our endeavours to explain the world around us and our place in it we systematically end up trapped in a web of superstitious nonsense, where irrational dogma quickly fills the gaps in our understanding. Ironic don’t you agree?

Regardless, the message is plain, self-evident and simple to comprehend. You may behave and believe as you please, but all efforts to thwart time are bound to fail.

So you’d best not waste it. Value, use, enjoy each moment. And where creating wealth is concerned, pay heed to my favourite admonishment from Felix Dennis. You will never start unless you start NOW!

The world we inhabit is enormously different to that of our forbears and the world our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will inherit may be scarcely recognisable to us, but one constant will always unite us.

We come and we go. The brief moment of time in between is all any of us, prince or peasant, ever have. What could you possibly hold more precious?