When you need to know the time, you might look at your life instead of your wrist. We’ve become so conditioned by the wristwatch, that we’ve really lost our ability to know the time. We may be able to recite the hour of the day, but I’m afraid we may have know idea how to read the time and the times.

Yesterday, I considered how a calendar might begin to help us understand time and the movement of people through time. Today I want to specifically consider time in the life of a person. Our life has its own time. Thus we can speak of a person’s lifetime. We have a specific birth time and will have a specific death time. Between those two points in time, we live through many different sets of time.

Instead of simply thinking of seconds, minutes and hours, we might think of other ways to define time. For instance, we mark each day as a specific measurement of time, and then we associate meaning with specific days. People will say things like, “I hate Mondays.” Or “Friday is finally here.” We group Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday together and define that unit of time as the weekend.

We mark the passing of years. Each year we celebrate with a birthday. In one sense, every time we pass a time marker the world around us changes. We change our words, our clothes, and even our relations. At a basic level, we change our words. I am 43, but after my next birthday I’ll refer to myself as 44. So we measure changes in years. Then again, decades are even more significant. So people will often reserve special celebrations for the changing of decades such as 20, 30, 40, 50 and so on.

But not all are units of time are equal sets (like the minute and hour of the watch). We look at a person’s life and may divide by time segments such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, teenager, young adult, middle age, and so on. Each of these time units (or epochs) might be used to explain other epochs. For example, the epoch of childhood might be used to explain the teenage period. We may explain a teenager’s poor or unusual behavior by pointing back to their childhood. We looking back to an earlier epoch to understand a current epoch.

But we can also look forward to a future epoch to help understand the present. A teenager might look to the future and dream of being a doctor as an adult. The future epoch will give the teenager direction for study and preparation in the present.

While I’ve used years and development terms (adolescence, teenager, etc) as time designations, there are many more in each person’s life. We might measure life from job to job. Or before marriage and after marriage. All these ways of thinking about world during our lives, provide filters for meaning. Our times help us to define or find meaning in the world. Now there is another way to think about time within a person’s life: memory and vision.