Knowing time waits for no one, how are you measuring your life?



How are you measuring out your life? Or do you ever give it much thought? Wally often tells me that I think too much and maybe so. Usually though there is something that has set my mind to racing – a word, a phrase, a quote and so it is with this train of thought.

T.S. Eliot, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948, wrote in “The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock:” “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” As an avid coffee drinker, someone who is addicted beyond reason, the thought of measuring life with a coffee spoon spoke to me. Eliot’s character was obsessed with time and its passing. We often hear the words of the Rolling Stones song, “Time is on My Side,” not always hearing the whole song, just the chorus: “Yeah, time, time, time is on my side (Yes it is).”

The poem and the song both address the issue of time. Eliot’s character says he is measuring life with a coffee spoon but yet he realizes how time is and has passed him by.

And maybe love itself has passed him by. In the song, the singer has time to wait while the love of his life lights up the town in her quest for freedom. Simply put, the song says over and over that time is on his side. We ask ourselves the question: Is it? Is time on our side?

Talk to most anyone over the age of 40 and you will get a litany of ailments. Time takes its toll.

Like Eliot’s character, talk to any man with thinning hair and if they were totally honest with you they’d be concerned about it. Or maybe talk to the woman whose hair is now streaked with wisps of gray. What does she see and know when she looks at herself in the mirror? And even if she chooses to color it, it is still there and still graying. Time waits for no one and it is telling.

One of Grandma’s favorite sayings was “time will tell.” We are told that only time will tell if the current economic policies will work. Some of the best advice ever given to me when facing a situation beyond my control was that prayer and time would make the difference. And that it has.

While we might want to measure out our lives with a coffee spoon, if you are like me you have lived a vast portion of it without even thinking of its passing. Grandma used to talk about time flying too.

Guess you have realized by now that while not always seeming to listen to what she had to say at the time, her sayings have impacted my life.

While she thought time was passing quickly I thought that summer vacation or Christmas would never come. Now it seems like some months are just a blur. Does anyone remember February? We are already planning for summer and Christmas will be here before we know it.

Time: Don’t let it pass you by while waiting for things to get better and for life to be like you imagined it would be.

And lest we forget a word from Carl Sandburg: “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”



Simply Sandy is written by Sandy Jarrell and appears the first Wednesday of each month. Simply put, it’s Sandy waxing wordy once a month about life as she knows it. Jarrell is a native and life-long resident of Coleridge and a librarian at Ramseur Public Library. She can be reached by e-mail at wjarrell@rtmc.net