Time is

money, they say, but no, it isn't. Time is not money, and

cannot be measured in the way money can.

You can

earn money and spend money and keep track of money. While

you may not know exactly how much money you will have at

a given time in your life, you probably know whether your

paycheck will cover expenses, how well your investments

will do, how much a pension plan will pay... and you can

amend income or reduce outgo.

Money is

predictable, trackable. You know how much is in your

account.

But time?

Not one person on earth knows how much time he or she

will have, in total. And yet, for every person on earth,

for every person in history or yet to be born, time is

doled out in precisely the same increments: 24 hours from

midnight to midnight, 60 minutes in each of them, 60

seconds to each minute.

Whether you

are Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, Billy the Kid or Billy

Beckett, Bill Shakespeare or the Queen of England, the

allotment of time is precisely the same.

Sixty

seconds each minute, 60 minutes each hour, 24 hours each

day, 365 days three years out of four.

At the risk

of taking an analogy too far: both money and time can be

invested and good choices may, possibly, stretch both.

The investment of money may yield more money, but the

investment of time will not yield more time.

And on a

day by day basis, you can increase the portion of money,

but not of time. While there is time, more money may be

earned; when time runs out, no amount of money will buy

more of it.

Our sense

of time expands or contracts at different stages of our

lives. You can't mollify a raging toddler with a promise

of his next meal in five minutes - that's an

eternity. A kindergartner thinks Christmas will never get

here. From Monday until a Friday night date with the

school hunk is forever to a yearning teen. At the other

end of the scale, the warp can go either way. I doubt

that I'm the only rising senior who would vote eagerly to

hold Christmas only in leap year. Yet for every golden

anniversary couple that smiles, "It seems like only

yesterday...," there is the aging parent staring

vacantly at the TV set. How long until the weekend when

the family might visit? As technology continues to enrich

- or curse - our lives, we believe it gives us

more time. If that were true, why would one of last

week's papers say, "Doctors have less time to spend

one-on-one with patients"?

Wrong. They

have exactly the same amount of time now that they had a

century ago when they routinely made house calls in

five-mph horse-drawn buggies. We all have.

If each of

us has the same amount of time on an hourly, daily,

weekly basis, it would appear that the difference between

us, then, is in how we spend it. When we say we don't

have time to volunteer at our children's schools, what we

are saying is we have the time, but don't wish to spend

it that way.

I've lived

long enough to remember the promises technology made in

mid-century that the Home of the Future would virtually

take care of itself; we'd have instantaneous

communication and transportation. Robots and computers

would take the backache out of industry. Sounds nice, we

thought, but ordinary people like ourselves will never be

able to afford such luxury.

Wrong

again. The promises were kept, both in ways that exceeded

our wildest dreams and at prices most of us can afford.

A color TV

costs less now than it did 30 years ago, and delivers a

stunningly more beautiful picture (content

notwithstanding). A notebook computer that can slip into

a student's backpack is more powerful and worlds faster

than the roomful of computers that sent a man to the

moon.

Here's my

favorite: After cigarettes went to an unacceptable

quarter a pack in 1955, Dave quit smoking and saved the

25 cents per day. In three years he had saved enough to

buy a table saw he wanted. Last fall when the windings in

the motor burned out, he deemed the saw too old to

repair, so I bought him a new one for Christmas.

It is far

more precise, has a larger blade than the old one, a

direct drive and no belt, making it easier to tilt the

blade for a beveled cut, and more safety features -

all for less than half the $300 he spent 40 years ago.

The

development of affordable time-saving machines in our

homes and businesses surely by now should have given us

several empty hours a day to loll by the pool, keep up

with bestsellers, or visit with a neighbor.

Instead, we

expect more of ourselves and of life. Not satisfied with

modest homes like those we grew up in, we want a dream

house with a nightmare mortgage requiring the second, or

third, family income.

Every kid

expects a car to go with her driver's license -

riding a school bus is out of the question - so time

must be spent (hers or her mother's) to buy the money

that must be spent to buy the car.

Meanwhile,

time is doing something odd. More new houses in more

suburbs, and more commuters in more cars, mean more

congestion. And for the first time in memory, it now

takes more time, not less, to travel distances that have

not changed at all.

We're

spending time as though there were an infinite source of

it.

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