The image above is like a sand timer only instead of grains trickling through once a week I fill in the various blocks with color. I started doing this on my first day of retirement. I thought that having a way to physically account for the time might be of value. It does mean something more than the obvious idea that time, for us finite beings, is not an abstract concept. If we lived as if eternity was our hourglass, well, what’s the point. Since we are finite, my friends, then telling that story in this analog way works for me.

I am shocked by how many of these mosaics, these drawn hourglasses, I have filled in. Another shocker for me is that it is not the colored in tiles that truly signify–it’s the blank spaces that I meditate upon. Wondering the usual wonderments:

when I fill something in does the color matter?
what happens to the mosaic when it is all filled in?
could I use curvilinear spaces?
what do the empty spaces signify?

And many more queries into meaning.  The epistemologies of empty spaces?  Lakoff and especially Johnson notes that many of these metaphorical container categories (fill in, empty out) are pre-linguistic.  In other words they are given schema dependent upon the logic of our bodies and all of the deep adaptations that have been wrought at the cellular level.

Ultimately, the mosaic is not only an hourglass, it is a calendar with sense of beginning or ending. It is just the inner part of a continuum of time  gone and time to be.

I am sure that the aphorism, “BE THE FUTURE” fits.  It argues for many of the ideas and activities I have been exploring and promoting in my Futurity Project.  My future emerges from the blank spaces in the mosaic.  When I stop making blank spaces on card to color in, it is obvious that I must be unable to do so and am probably dead.  In my future where I am part of thrash metal band, they will be called, “ProbablyDead”.

Clearly, I am (along with eternity) the co-creator of time.  I say, “Be that future and make it the best of times.”

You know how. Do it. Just fly…