2017: Bruce R. Babbitt Reflects on Time

1.6.17

I woke up at 3:30 to use the restroom.  I laid back down to sleep, and in a matter of minutes, it was 5:30 and the alarm went off.  I got up and staggered into the bathroom to urinate again and get a drink of water.  I laid back down for a few minutes, drifting in and out of sleep.  Afraid that I might drift back into a deep sleep with no alarm set, I forced myself to get up.  It was now 5:40.  The odd thing was that as far as I could tell it was the same amount of time.  Two hours and 10 minutes were the same.  There was no difference in the perceived time between 3:30-5:30 and 5:30-5:40.  From my perspective, the intervals were the same.  When we sleep, time is relative.

It is the same with life.  I spent as much time living from ages 5 to 10 as I did living from ages 10 to 20, or for that matter, from ages 20 to 40.  Time just keeps speeding up.  By the time I finish writing this journal entry, I could be dead.

Bruce R. Babbitt thought a lot about time.  It was his job.  He was a paleontologist at B.Y.U., and it was not an easy environment for such an occupation.  Although most of the general authorities and prophets (both present and in the past) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints believed in deep time and a very old earth, including Joseph Smith himself, many members did not, and students taking his class often felt he was leading them off the strait and narrow path to salvation even though, from his perspective, he was just teaching them how much time God took to give man a most amazing world.

The ironic thing was, just as Bruce R. Babbitt concluded writing By the time I finish writing this journal entry, I could be dead, he was, in fact, dead.

Well, sort of.  He floated at the corner of his bedroom, just below the ceiling, looking down on his corpse slumped over, propped up on the pillows next to his wife Natasha.  He was disgusted that spit drooled out of his mouth.  Natasha always got upset that his pillowcase was stained yellow.  "Sleep with your mouth closed," she'd say.  "I can't always be buying fresh pillow cases."  She always did.  She couldn't stand yellow pillow cases.  Here, at his dying hour, he'd spit all over her pillow cases--again. He felt that was a pretty thoughtless way to die; he just didn't know what to do about it.

There, stuck up in that corner of the room (oozed up into it is probably a better description, as if he were a liquid and somebody had turned off gravity), he was also disgusted that he died before getting to the part of his journal entry where he was going to talk about how the age of the earth might be every bit as relative as either the time when we are asleep or the way time speeds up as we age.  He had a theory:  Even though days were still 24 hours long, they weren't as long as they once were.  Time was speeding up as we approached the end of the world.  An hour was no longer an hour.  It had to be.  Each day he worked harder and harder, not because he had to, but he because he wanted to, to do his life's work, and each day he seemed to have less and less time.  It drove him crazy.  There was so much to learn and do.  He realized he'd failed to set up his home teaching appointments.  That's what woke him up at 3:30.

Now, here he was dead, and he would never get to visit his families this month, or explore his theory of shrinking time.  He would also never get to tell Natasha how beautiful she looked, her long black hair trailing across that big, fluffy pillow in the silky white case.  She did know how to make a bed.  The beds at Embassy Suites had nothing on hers.  And here he'd spent his life drooling all over her work.  Very thoughtless indeed.

It was at this moment he felt himself slip up through the ceiling boards (he never noticed the sheet rock) and then enter an intense white light.