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Norm today wonders how we cope nowadays with the superabundance of everything. Not everything, but everything, like books, CDs, films and so on and so forth.

In such days i.e. nowadays, it seems like there simply isn't enough time for everything — as norm suggests, we're losing control of time. I'd argue, though, that it's the exact opposite: time controls us. There is a finite number of books we can read, CDs we can listen to, films we can watch. It's a matter of taste as to what order we put everything into as to how we choose to spend the time available to us doing these things and whether, indeed, we wish to do them at all.

Given a finite amount of time, I wouldn't do what Melvil Dewey (he of the Dewey Decimal Classification system) did and encourage efficiency in everything. First off, I'd panic, which is what I regularly do anyway. And then I'd reflect that I simply won't get quite as far down my order of (every)things I'd hoped to. This seems a good plan because it has to be — finite time is all I've got! To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, time wins. In that sense, as in most all others, time is in control and not vice versa.

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