No more timely time to consider Time itself than right around the time we all make the consensual, arbitrary, stolid-but-capricious agreement to watch every midnight tick of the clock one night a year and swap out calendars, jumping from one felled tree to another in the roaring river of Time, as we log-drivers all shoot the mandatory rapids, trying to balance, stay upright, not get soaked or knocked in the drink, not get socked in the head by something large, unyielding, and not likely to stop at skull, once it gets up a head of steam, develops a mind of its own, aimed at our own head-meat.
When alive, those de-limbed trees blitzing the white-water once counted time on an arc far longer than the beings who felled them. Time is more relative than we think -- perhaps more than we can think.
We've all experienced the paralysis of time passage when laboring under weights of various dreads, known the palpable, brake-locked stoppage of time during moments of life-frozen crisis, felt the jet-winged shredding of clocks while swooping, soaring, and threading our many delights.
But, accounting for longer arcs and eras? That takes, well, time -- the nearest we're likely to get to feeling the stuff of tree-time, of sensing our inner rings under our barks and bites, of telling histories from what lies between those rings, from drought to drowning and back again, is experiencing a long wink of time, even though a brief blink in tree-time.
You see, I just discovered, moments ago, that Mario Cuomo left the planet on New Year's Day: