I guess I’ve known for most of my life that time is relative. To a four-year-old, four years is in fact a lifetime. To a college student, it’s the fleeting memories of high school days. To the couple with a young family, it’s the very short time before that balloon payment on the mortgage is due. And to the nonagenarian – it’s yesterday.

Calendars are one of mankind’s oldest creations, and one of our strictest slavemasters. We have to make and keep appointments within their limitations. They dictate holidays and celebrations, decide which days we work and play and relentlessly remind us that we are growing older. Calendars have been mostly based on the dictates of nature, the stars, the seasons, the cycles of our lives. We seem to need a way to remind ourselves of what looms in the future. Not as if we expect to have any say-so about what lies ahead, but just so we are warned in time to prepare for the inevitable.

There are some people, and I point at the ubiquitous advertising industry, who use the calendar as a weapon to lure us into thinking time passes even faster than it actually does. They urge us to shop for seasonal merchandise weeks, even months, before we actually need them. By midsummer, we are beginning to be bombarded with the urgency of shopping for school supplies; school has barely started before we are being badgered to stockpile Halloween treats and pick out costumes for parties, parades and trick-ortreat night. We can hardly finish our Thanksgiving dinner before we must rush out and stand in line to be first to grab the best bargains of the Christmas sales. We’re reminded to buy Valentine gifts while the Christmas lights are still up. I’m tempted to predict that we will soon think it necessary to prepare for holidays and other celebrations a year or more in advance.

This early heads-up not only gives us a false sense of urgency. An un-evadable monopoly, it demands our attention until, by the time special occasions actually arrive, we are thoroughly bored with them. This past summer’s Olympic Games are a case in point. Months ahead, we were treated to glimpses of the Paris preparations, then various qualifying competitions. We were reminded of medalists from past games, stories of hope, disappointments, dreams and failures of champions and would-be champions until, when the games finally began, we felt they had already taken place. By then, even though I marvel at what some athletes can endure and what feats they can perform, I was saturated with the experience and ready to return to my former television entertainments. Of course, they weren’t there for me to watch.

The World Olympic Games are filled with glamour, glitz and glory, but they are still just games. Those ancient Olympics were probably more important. They began as preparation and training for warfare. They served as shows of strength to impress adversaries. They glorified skills, physical fitness and endurance necessary to survival and often ended, not with cheers and medals, but with maiming and death. I question what practical use there is, in our modern time, for being able to swim faster than the other guy or to jump high and spin around three times before landing on a narrow rail.

Competitions and refinement of specific skills benefit those who are dedicated to self-improvement and I can understand their value, but for the rest of us they are mere spectator sports. We can lounge on the sofa with our beer and chips and never work up the slightest trace of a sweat. While watching such near-perfection may be more interesting than some of the things that make it to the airwaves, some of us simply have other interests, and different ideas of what constitutes entertainment. I wish that, four years from now, someone will have figured out a way for us to watch as much of the Olympic games as we desire – with an equal chance of continuing to enjoy our usual programming. Perhaps each network could add one channel exclusively for the Olympics and leave the rest just as they’ve always been – at least we’d have a broader choice of what to watch.