Merlin’s Time Trap

1650 words, 7 minute read

If you’re on the right side of 60, this may be the most important post you’ll ever read; If not, I’m sorry, it’s probably too late for you. You needn’t read on (unless you’re curious). But for those of you still with us, Caveat Tempus! Beware of Time.

As you taxi down the runway at your favorite international airport, you can’t help but notice that your runway is shrinking. Every 10 yards brings the end of the runway just that much closer. You are experiencing calendar time.

Common sense says that you should have a similar experience with life expectancy. Whatever your ‘date of death’ turns out to be, it is obvious that you’re getting closer to it every day. Your runway is getting shorter…one day at a time.

That’s just common sense…but it’s not what you experience, is it? By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed that time seems to pass more quickly than it did when you were a wee’un. Thank God for that! I thought 4^th grade would last forever.

But it’s a mixed blessing. You’re glad you don’t have to sit through another spirit killing day of primary school but on the other hand, you realize that the runway ahead is not shrinking at a steady pace after all; your plane is gaining speed so your runway’s shrinking at an accelerating rate. Welcome to objective time.

You reassure yourself, “And indeed there will be time…time to murder and create…time to wonder ‘Do I dare?’…time to turn back and descend the stair.” (Eliot) Relax, you still have time to measure out your life with coffee spoons!

Ah you poor deluded fool! There is no more time, there is no more runway, there are no more spoons; the Apocalypse is now! Subjective time does not flow at a uniform rate nor does it steadily accelerate. Rather, it accelerates at an accelerating rate…until it doesn’t.

You have entered the Twilight Zone, no longer a child, not yet an old coot, you’re now finally and forever just what you’ve always wanted to be…an adult. For this you endured 12 to 20 years of school and as many years of ‘parents’ helicopter guidance’, but it was worth it; you’ve arrived. At last ‘we are there now’!

Let’s set your stage. You’re 35 (or thereabouts), no longer in school, no longer in your parents’ house…or their garage. No more dorm rooms, no more apartments shared with anonymous, psychopathic roommates from the internet.

You have a steady job, very possibly a career; you have (or have had) a relationship with a significant other, and you may even have children of your own to abuse and misdirect, lucky them…and they didn’t even ask to be born. But I digress. Finally, you are who you’ve been coming to be all your life; you are who you are and ever more will be so. Could anything be better?

Yes, it could. Time could stop. You’re earning money, accumulating possessions, collecting experiences, making memories. You think, “If only this time could last forever!”

But be careful what you pray for. Merlin may be listening. Now Merlin is powerful but even he can’t stop time; he can, however, slow it way, way down. Or at least, he can make it seem like it’s slowed way down.

And so, as though the universe was at your beck and call, time seems to stand still. 40, 45, 50, 55, 60… yes, you’re a little flabbier, a little greyer, but on a deeper level, you are at 60 what you were at 35, just richer…or poorer, and there’s no indication that this hiatus in the flow of time will ever end.

Gloriously, you are like a fly caught in amber; your now is wedged between the myriad indignities of childhood and the even greater indignities of old age, but not to worry, your now is stable, it feels like it will last forever.

Congratulations, you are caught in Merlin’s Time Trap. Time has slowed to a crawl. Your children sprout past you like corn stalks, but nothing else much changes. You work, you play, you eat, you drink and occasionally you sleep. Life goes on. Everything feels scripted…but that’s ok, most of the time. This is what you waited 35 years for after all. You should be content.

Of course, you’re not! ‘Your new job’s a hassle and the kids have the flu’ (Jim Croce). You are taking care of children and parents at the same time, and your ‘beloved’ has now become your ‘ball and chain’.

And money! Sure you do ok and you get regular raises, but you never ever have enough. “Can I afford this house, this car, this bottle of wine, this summer camp, this toy? Will I ever be able to afford to retire?” Like a bass line, this mantra plays in the background 24/7.

Sidebar: We don’t realize that the global economic system has evolved to ensure that everyone, ok everyone except maybe the 1%ers, is perpetually skint. If you’ve been renting, now you must buy a place of your own. If you’ve been driving a used sedan, now you must have a brand new SUV. If you’ve been feasting on Outback’s Bloomin’ Onion, now you prefer Del Frisco’s. And your kids have to go to the private university of their choice…if they get in.

The global economy thrives by creating ever more demand and by turning every desire into a necessity. So what, you keep making more money each year; what’s the problem? Headwinds!

As you climb the economic ladder, the system imposes ever steeper demands on your resources. If your wages are rising arithmetically, your obligations, e.g. taxes (sales, real estate, excise, income and estate), are increasing geometrically. If your kids go to college, whatever you’ve managed to save will be confiscated and any surplus disposable income you earn will be forfeited in the 21^st century’s ‘great education funding scam’.

This is what you’ve been waiting for all your life…and it’s a sh*tsh*w. You keep your head down and you don’t dare look in the mirror. But then you do and you realize that your life lacks the one thing that might make it worthwhile: meaning!

“What’s it all about, Alfie?” So you set out to fill the hole in your soul. You have an affair, you divorce and marry a ‘trophy spouse’, you buy a bright red, European sports car. Bully! And now you have even more stress.

When you hit 40, you said, “Gee, I’ve still only lived half my life…and it’s taken forever for me to get here, so what, me worry?” When you hit the big ‘60’, you said it’s ‘the new 40’ and when you hit 70, you said, “I have 15 good years left in me.” Then a year or two later, you’re retired and wondering what happened.

Merlin is a devious imp…and he doesn’t have your best interests at heart. Unlike Moses in the desert with YHWH, you’ve spent 40 years under Merlin’s spell…and it’s been more or less wonderful…or not. Like countless Fausts before you, you made your deal with the devil with barely a thought of repayment.

But while you have been floating in Cloud Cuckoo Land, life on Earth has moved forward…40 years forward; and now it’s time for re-entry. Prepare for impact! You re-enter with a jolt. It’s like coming down the birth canal all over again…but now cynicism and depression have replaced wonder.

Just yesterday you were 30, then for 40 years you were no particular age. You were one of Gertude Stein’s ‘always to ourselves young men and young women’.

Now suddenly, you’re 75 (you look even older BTW). In fact, you literally cannot recognize yourself in a mirror. (You assume it’s your image, not because it resembles you in any way but because you’re standing in front of a lit mirror and that usually delivers a ‘true likeness’.)

So let me reframe: You’re 75 now and you’ve just woken up from what must now seem like 40 years of hibernation. You are meeting yourself for the first time since young adulthood. For the past 35 years ‘you’ were X% job/career, Y% family, Z% ‘society’ (i.e. boardrooms, bar rooms, brothels, and the Benevolent Society), 0% you.

But when you re-enter, all the molecules rearrange: X goes to 0, Y is less all-consuming, and Z nose dives. You’re left with a large remainder of something totally unfamiliar: Yourself. You have rediscovered your birth self (“oh yeah, this used to be me”) but you have almost no ‘quality time’ left to get to know one another.

You are the anti-Odysseus. While still a young man, the hero left idyllic Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War. When he returned to his home island 40 years later, things had changed, he had changed. He had visited the realm of the dead, conversed with blind Tiresias, endured terrible trials and endured enormous losses, not the least of which was the loss of time itself. 

How much time? The math is complicated but I estimate that Poseidon robbed Odysseus of about 60% of his calendar life…and Merlin will do the same to you…if you let him.

You are the anti-hero of your own epic. So, my friend, beware Merlin’s Time. Steer clear, if you can. If not, at least try to stay awake. And if not even that, prepare yourself for the shock of reentry. Home isnot Laertes’ Ithaca!