Within a lifetime there are a myriad of times. I have visceral childhood memories of sitting in the classroom, looking at the warm spring sunshine and blue sky, feeling like the school day would never end; now years fly by almost like they were weeks. Seen through the lens of age, time does seem to move at a swifter pace (Chernus, 2011). Time is the container for our life span and the dimension we live in. It is unstoppable. Time is always a moving universal force through all lives. The flow of time has carried the postwar cohort along, past youth and middle age, toward old age. They now see time through the lens of many more years lived and from a very different point in their life spans. I know, like most of my research participants, that I have lived more years than I have left in my lifetime. As we shall see in this chapter, this shift in perspective changes our relationship to time. It is not just our sense of time that shifts through a life span, but also the meaning we attribute to time. There is a visceral sense of finitude in knowing that more years have been lived and experienced than remain ahead of us. This consciousness changes our view of time. We perceive life from the perspective of ‘relative time.’ In this chapter, we see how some of the many aspects of time are described and defined by the research participants.

Time is …

Although many people use chronological time as a marker, it is the lived experience that creates meaning (Bytheway, 2011). Events and, more importantly, relationships are interwoven in time to create meaning in our lives. Relationships in time are more than shared experience, although that is certainly part of their dynamic. Relationships also live in time within us as memory and imagined futures. Others are a resonance in our memories and future musings. In this chapter, many of the quotes are connected to relationships with friends, family, colleagues, or acquaintances.