Chrono Logical

I was hiking next to the Na'ili'ili-Haele stream and thinking, "Time is a construct." The biggest company in the world is telling us we all need a new watch - the "Watch"- to help us keep track of how much time we spend doing things we should or should not be doing, like sleeping or running or sitting or checking our phones. And I was thinking I don't need to know the time exactly as my boys and I were walking through a bamboo forest in the middle of the classic discussion of "how fast does bamboo grow?" Compared to what? It's the fastest growing plant as we know - some species can grow as much as 3 feet in 24 hours or a millimeter every 2 minutes. That's pretty speedy, for organic stuff. But, cheetahs can hit 60 mph in 4 seconds and a falcon can fly/dive 240 mph.

The bamboo we were surrounded by was up to 60 or 70 feet tall; the tallest species of this giant grass gets up to 130 feet. But we have 6 feet of DNA in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies. And as far as speed goes, our microscopic biomechanical machinery replicating DNA and fabricating protein molecules is without peer - 100 trillion molecules of hemoglobin is being created per second in every person reading this.

So back to Time in the forest of fastest growing plants, bamboo also produces flowers and has the distinction of being the plant with the longest time between blooming. One species only blossoms every 130 years. There we go - fastest and slowest.

Do I need a watch? Do you? There's a guy in Britain named Krzysztof Szymaniec. I'm pretty sure he doesn't. He is the keeper of the "Caesium Fountain," an atomic clock accurate to one second every 158 million years. I hope he takes hikes with his boys. And by the way, uphill of the bamboo forest is a 400 foot waterfall. Take a dip when you get there. Without your watch.