Word Magic

It’s About Time

Laurel Airica

Mirror Contributing Writer

   More people die at 9 a.m. Monday morning than at any other time of the day or the week, according to mind/body expert Dr. Deepak Chopra. To understand why the Monday Morning Blues should so often prove fatal, we need look no further than the English language for subversive echoes of our own unconscious. Here, for example, is the premier Life Sentence of the daily grind:
   We awake each morning and go off during the weekdays to earn our living at various jobs and undertakings until we come to the weekend.
   This statement sounds perfectly innocuous—if not particularly palatable—on the surface. But when reviewed from the perspective of the unheard word, it sounds more like a motto from the death camps, for—A wake is a funeral party for the dead. Mourning is the state we are in when we attend a wake. We would have to be in a weak daze to earn the living since urns are for the dead. It is, therefore, appropriate that we refer to our work as an undertaking, or even just a job since job is a Hebrew word for persecuted. And then all that remains to us after “taking such pains” to maintain ourselves, is the weak end of this perverse compromise with life or to become progressively weakened.
   This macabre formulation is reminiscent of the zombie movies of the 1950s that reflected us back to ourselves with such descriptive titles as Night of the Living Dead. Or, just think of our contemporary preoccupation with terror and carnage as the primary subjects for our news and entertainment. With such a dismal attitude toward the time of our lives, it is little wonder that the word live anagrams into evil and vile, while death anagrams into hated.
   Compounding—and echoing—our penchant to live in the shadow lands, is the fact that so many of our words related to time are negative and even violent. For instance, night falls so day breaks. The past, present, and future all are referred to in terms of tense; and indeed, many people do feel up tight all of the time. We also speak of killing, wasting, beating and cheating time while yet fearing that time is running out for us. We are thus compelled to race against time in a mad dash to meet deadlines.
   Though time is a strictly human invention, the hands of the clock have a real choke hold on us. But when we shift our focus to live in the moment, we become free to open the gift of the present. Then in no time at all, the anxious feeling of falling behind in the human race completely disappears. For in the mirror of the infinite, eternal time/space called now, we see that we have all won already because we are all one now and always.
   Even Time reverses itself in the cosmic mirror—to reveal the word emit. Perhaps this means that the real purpose for our lifetime is to express our inner essence. Though it often feels that there is not enough time in the daily grind to do so; in actual fact, Time is hours.