The subject I am going to talk about today was described by the following:

Sometimes it flies, sometimes it crawls, but it always passes in inexorably. We mark it, save it, waste it, bide it, race against it. We measure it incessantly with a passion for precision that borders on the obsessive.1

We are obsessed with it; we never seem to have enough of it; and yet scientists don’t even know how to explain it. When St. Augustine was asked to describe it, he said: “If no one asks me, I know what it is; but if any person should require me to tell him, I could not do it.”2

What am I talking about? I am talking about time. Never before in the history of the world has time ever been so important, so valuable, and so precisely measured as it is today.

Think about this: In 1790, less than 10% of…