Manipulating Time

For I have discovered the secret of manipulating time, slowing it down.

Some background: I lay abed the other night in a cold sweat with the horrible realisation that I was now 54 and closer to death than I have ever been. How did this happen? (No correspondence please, I actually know) This at a time in my life when things seem to be zipping by and each Christmas comes around quicker than the last.

The following evening however, a revelation. Time can be slowed down to a mere trickle in the auditorium of any performing arts centre where there's a musical playing. A case in point the present production of West Side Story at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. I was present on opening night and about 30 minutes into the show I realised that time had slowed down and  the sand through the hourglass was moving like treacle.

I had done it, I had slowed time down without even trying, just be being there and witnessing the amateurish horrors unfolding on stage. There, in Row D, I experienced a statis worthy of a book by Stephen Hawking. In my seat I conquered and toyed with time - every second seemed like an hour, every minute an hour, every hour a day, even a week. After interval time seemed to stand still completely and I experienced the eternal moment in a way that I imagine few humans have.

In extremis I had conquered time and space. Hawking tells us that time moves at different speeds in various parts of the universe. In my own theatrical black hole I was a Time Lord par excellence and I watched my entire life pass before my inner eye in that brief eternity. I have experienced flashes of this before, mostly sitting, looking at my watch in a darkened theatre, wishing I was elsewhere. But this time it was a Satori beyond anything that had gone before. Remember the lines of the song ..."If I could put time in a bottle ..." by Jim Croce?  That was me. I was the vessel and time filled me to the brim and I captured time, distilled it and drank it down. Then, my mastery of that most enigmatic universal experience was relinquished as the curtain came down and the show, mercifully, ended. I looked at my watch. Strangely only a couple of hours had elapsed, hours that felt like centuries, millenia even.

I can't wait to go back to the theatre again, soon, to experiment with this phenomenon. It should be a musical, however, because time passes most slowly when there is singing and dancing involved. Weird, huh?

 

15 Nov 2010

Last Update: 28 Mar 2011

Phil Brown - Journalist - Author Profile | Email | Website As a journalist I mostly write on the arts & entertainment. Read my weekly journalism in Brisbane News. As an author I write about myself and, if that sounds self-indulgent, you don't know the half of it. Mind you if you read either of my memoirs - Travels with My Angst or Any Guru Will Do, all will be revealed. Available as Speaker - humorist focusing on problems associated with existential angst and life's journey. Brisbane QLD Australia 3000 Please e-mail