One of the themes of my book is to examine the cliché "actions speak louder than words" from a philosophical perspective. At 115,000 words, it takes a little while to get through. But it got me thinking of other clichés that could be analyzed in this way. Since time is also a major subject of the book, I’m going to pick this one as a taster—a soupçon of the method.

The gerund "timing" is open to myriad interpretations, but for now, let us settle on the definition from the OED: "the choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done." That is problematic from the outset. Do we really have a choice in the timing of things? Or any control over them? Having just written a shedful of words on the existential nature of our lives, I am aware these are not flippant questions.

Timing is everything. Notice the absence of qualifiers—such as almost, nearly, just about, or virtually. It is everything. In which case, surely the question is begged: what else could there possibly be instead of timing that could be considered so absolute in nature?

What about money? Well, some folks clearly live according to that principle. But here’s the thing with money: what happens when you don’t have much of it, and a bill for more than you’ve got arrives at just that moment? That’s bad timing. Alternatively, an excellent investment opportunity comes along when you have the cash available to take advantage of it. That’s good timing. In both cases, it’s not the money, but the timing that is the primary factor.

What about love? That is certainly worth exploring. Who could really argue with the expression—nay, the cliché—that love is everything? In many ways, it is. However, I can think of one point in my life when it wasn’t. I loved a girl once. She was everything to me, and I believe she felt the same way. I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life; the problem was, she was younger than me and at a different point in her journey. She felt she was too young to get married, with too many things left to experience first. I suggested we go on the journey together, but she wasn’t convinced. The breakup hurt, but in the end, I realized the timing was just wrong. Timing, after all, was more important than love.

What about wisdom? Wisdom knows when the timing is right. What about knowledge, family, career, destiny, fate, or luck? Location, location, location; skill, practice, experience, contacts, success, failure, ideology, faith. I could go on. The point is, if the timing is right, all these things might very well help. But if the timing is wrong, none of them will. This is because timing completes them all; without it, nothing is guaranteed.

Timing, then, is the ontological glue that fixes, grounds, roots, and secures everything else. Therefore, I put it to you that it is the most linguistically deserving of the signified everything. In the grand architecture of existence, context means nothing without the clock.