Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Al Stewart 1978

I’ve stopped watching currency markets. No longer do I check the Dow first thing in the morning, ever watchful over my pension and savings. Currently inflation is soaring and the price of basics like food, accomodation and gas are affecting us all. And it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I have come to understand that I had my eye on the wrong account, my bank account. I have always been able to earn good money, paid well for the work I did blissfully unaware that in the end, in the real end how much money I had made or had squirrelled away just doesn’t matter. I have enough money, not as much as others perhaps, not as much as I might want for sure but in the end it is enough. What I am running out of though is the other currency: Time.

I have eagerly anticipated every Bond movie since the first one in 1963, each and every one of them a satisfying mulch of action, humour and manliness all wrapped into a Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative. They taught me nothing nor did I look to the Bond movies to be taught anything. And indeed if they did teach me anything it was nothing good, as the decades which have unfolded since have revealed. But flaws, faults and failures aside Bond was for me pure pulp fiction which was all I wanted it to be. Then I watched a more recent Bond film ‘No Time to Die’. And out of nowhere some bright screenwriter decides to get all profound on me.

M is toasting Bond after The World’s Greatest Man had been blown to smithereens in a fiery explosion.

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my Time.”

What the hell?! A Bond film is the last place I would expect for profound thoughts on living. But as it happens I was jolted by the message. Perhaps something to do with being seventy-four. It reminded me once again that the only currency that really matters is Time. We can’t control anything about money. Wall Street, the markets, geopolitical conflict, Saudi oil, inflation, pick your poison we have no control over the macro economic influences which use our money at will and without our consent. But Time, now there’s a currency we can do something about. And if we are mindful, we can spend it wisely.

I have no particular wisdom about Time or anything else as a matter of fact, now that we’re talking about it. I am keenly aware at this stage in my life that I didn’t use my Time as well as I might. I was careless and self absorbed and arrogant until well into my thirties. I suppose it simply takes Time to really learn what is actually important. At least it did for me.

One of the challenges about Time is the raw, sometimes jagged awareness that we still have Time. Until we don’t. It can be sudden or sometimes taken from us over Time and it is nearly always cruel. All of us have lost friends and family, sometimes suddenly other times over the course of months and years. This past year has braced me in its relentless unkindness, taking people and close friends. But I will be damned if I don’t get the bloody message.

Time is in the end the only currency that matters and I will double down on how I use what I have remaining in my account. I have always been uninhibited around those I love. They all know how much I love them if for no other reason I tell them every day. I will do what I can to be joyful and to display it. I have taught my grandson Freddy how to suck jello off a plate with his hands behind his back. That was a grand use of my Time. I will filter any urge to beep my horn or gesture in anger or display temper. I won’t succeed of course but I will remind myself in those moments that it is a flat out stupid use of my Time. I will take our dog Edith to the Departure Day Dog Park in Nanaimo many times each week where I’ll watch her show me how she uses Time in joyful, suspended doginess. I will say ‘yes’ as much as I possibly can and I will say ‘hello’ to perfect strangers until one of my children tells me not to.

I will in short spend my Time better, as well as I know how. And on my last day those who love me will be able to say, “It was his Time.“