The Subtle Landscape

  While back I mentioned that my knee hurt.  Now knees.  Have previously had pain when I ran in the same pair of shoes for too long or wore arch supportless deck shoes too often.  Brother MD prescribed Advil and new shoes.  Always worked until about this past July. 

  Of a sudden the pain in left knee was too great to run. First time in thirty years. Laid off a few days and then hit road again.  Right thigh began to hurt because of significantly altered gait.  Now sometimes kneebones hurt just lying in bed.

  Switched to biking till pushed my luck in early darkness once too often.  Now stare at the bottom of a pool for what seems an eternity.  This morning the Stones’ song Time Is On My Side came to mind. “You’ll come running back…” go the lyrics. Hope!  Then dawned on me that it ain’t in this case and I might not.  Besides, the song basically betrays the singer’s misogyny and has nothing to do with exercise.

  Time does fly though.  And ever faster.  A given slice obviously forms a smaller percentage of the total with each passing moment.  A year in the life of a twelve year-old is a whole lot different than one in, say, someone in their fifties.  Stephen Hawking posits that there might be a related specific ratio. 

  Whatever.  For me, once the rhythms of a school calendar became a thing of the past my perception of time began to blur.  It sped up after I finished school, slowed down with kids, and then really accelerated as the last graduated from college.

  It’s interesting that motion through space and time are intertwined.  Sitting here at my desk, virtually all of my motion is through time.  Out for a run (I wish), a larger portion of my motion would be through space.  Einstein’s special theory of relativity holds that the combined speed of an object’s motion through time and space is exactly equal to the speed of light.

  What’s really amazing has to do with the fact that motion through time slows as motion through space picks up.  Relatively.  Experiments have proven that time passes more slowly for one running along the river (dang!) than for the lazy dopes home asleep in bed.  The difference though would only be noticeable when the moving object was considerably closer to 300,000,000 meters/second.  Time would stop for an object as it hit the speed of light.

  Have to find a way to warp speed.  Is it too late for astronaut school?  I don’t get scared easy; I love good views; and the weightless environment would be perfect.

  Oh oh. Better hurry.  Here is how Hippocrates counted life’s stages:

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