The marking, hoarding and spending of time has been an occupation of mankind since we first realized there was an order to the seeming chaos of life on earth itself: the sun came up, appeared to move, and went down. At certain times of the night, the white specks in the sky would move - and sometimes a large white ball would join them, contorting itself into various shapes, appearing and disappearing. Plants and animals and people grew up, grew outward, fell down dead, and grew up again. No society has ever lived without at least a rudimentary system of daylight and darkness, stars and sun, growing and incubating, from desert to steppe to mountain peak. Time is a part of us and we are a part of time.

For the Kemetic, time and its recordation are the gift of Djehuty (Thoth in Greek), and/or His consort Seshat. Djehuty's role in the timing of events was recorded in a Kemetic myth: He played senet with the moon, in order to win five extra days to correct a 360-day calendar that was falling out of synch with the actual seasons. One of Seshat's duties as the Divine Accountant is to record the events of one's life upon the leaves of a sacred tree in the courtyard of Ra's temple, to mark our personal time in a symbolic way.

Even our language is filled with time and time signals. It will take you "a minute, or two," or "just a second," to read this. It may give you "pause," or you may be "in a hurry" to read something else. Maybe you are so "pressed for time" that you will do more than one thing "at a time."

The ancient Egyptians gave us our reckoning of days: 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night; months (12 also); weeks (actually, three weeks of 10 for them, as their months were all of uniform length) and both solar and lunar calendars. They did not give us their seasons (only three), which are tied to the Nile cycle directly; nor did we get smaller segments of time (such as the 60-minute hour and the 60-second minute) from them, but the calendar you look at on your wall today has its roots in some ancient Egyptian astronomer's reckoning of the heavenly and earthly cycles. Time is a gift of Netjer; and reckoning it a gift of our forebears, and we carry it forth proudly.

Or not? Time, while "fixed" in the sense of watches/clocks/calendars, is also quite relative. It's one thing to have 30 minutes to get to work and spend 29 of them yelling at the person in front of you to drive faster; and it's quite another to spend 30 minutes, say, basking in sunlight on the deck of a cruise ship. Waiting to get into the bathroom, three minutes may seem like hours. Your children never believe you when you tell them it's actually bedtime, and for your case, it never quite feels right when lunch break is over. Some cultures hoard time for leisure; others insist on spending every little minute on the cell phone or in the boardroom. Even within the same country, time can be differently perceived - ever heard of a "New York Minute?"

In Egypt today, as in antiquity, time is still viewed as a gift from Netjer - not to be hoarded, wished for, or lamented when it's gone, but just there. Time will be there whether you worry about it or not, and the Egyptians still seem to understand this better than many of the rest of us do. It has been said that the three most common words in Egyptian vernacular are "insh'allah" (God willing), "bukrah" (tomorrow) and "mimkin" (maybe). Have to go somewhere? You'll get there. How fast? When you get there, God willing. On one of my intercountry trips during my pilgrimage to Egypt two years ago, we ran around the hotel room like maniacs at 4 a.m. to make sure we would make our connecting Cairo flight to Aswan, scheduled for 7 a.m. The taxi driver didn't get to the hotel until 5:30 and it took an hour to get to the airport. We were still standing in line to get boarding passes as 7:00 came and I noted the time to our Cairene guide.

"Don't worry - no problem!" he assured us. "The plane will wait until everyone has arrived." It did - and we didn't leave for Aswan until almost 9. But we got there - and no one seemed aggravated by the time delay, except of course for the foreigners.... By the time I had returned to New York, I was almost reduced to tears by the force of people literally shoving me aside - to make their planes on time. Insh'allah, we could learn something from the Egyptians.

"Follow your desire," states the Egyptian text. Are you in a hurry? Next time you catch yourself in that rush, stop. Think about why you are rushing. Decide whether it's really necessary or not, and remember not to waste time, for as Ptahhotep continues, that is an abomination - and it is nothing to lose time over.