what time is it?

A forwarded mail from Tiger Pran…

> At 12hr 34 minutes and 56 seconds on the
> 7th of August this year (2009),
> the time and date will be
> 12:34:56 07/08/09
> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
> This will never happen in your life again !
> Amaze your friends .
> Be the first 2 tell them

Reminds me once in a way a friend and me used to watch our digital wristwatch during schooldays at special number sequences like this! But this is just amazing unbeatable 🙂

One idea that occurred is that time right now happens to be 12:34:44: 30/06/09 …which will never happen again in my life either! Heh heh no harm in noting that every moment is so precious! 😉

There are some nice books on time I’d come across in Bristol named Ten Thoughts about Time. A lucid description is in the novel Siddartha by Herman Hesse…

In a friendly manner, he [Siddhartha] lived side by side with Vasudeva[on the bank of a river], and
occasionally they exchanged some words, few and at length thought about
words. Vasudeva was no friend of words; rarely, Siddhartha succeeded
in persuading him to speak.

“Did you,” so he asked him at one time, “did you too learn that secret
from the river: that there is no time?”

Vasudeva’s face was filled with a bright smile.

“Yes, Siddhartha,” he spoke. “It is this what you mean, isn’t it: that
the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the
waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains,
everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not
the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future?”

“This it is,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learned it, I looked at
my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only
separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a
shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha’s previous births were
no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing
was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is
present.”

Siddhartha spoke with ecstasy; deeply, this enlightenment had delighted
him. Oh, was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting
oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything
hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time,
as soon as time would have been put out of existence by one’s thoughts?
In ecstatic delight, he had spoken, but Vasudeva smiled at him brightly
and nodded in confirmation., silently he nodded, brushed his hand over
Siddhartha’s shoulder, turned back to his work.

A nice rhyme I’d heard when I was a kid… (hopefully I can buy this audio somewhere again for my son!) …a simple answer for ‘what time is it?’

The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
And the way to be happy
Is to make someone happy
And we’ll have a little heaven right here!