Dr. Raymond Cook often corrected references to time vs. distance.

If someone asked, for example, how long does it take to get to Atlanta from Valdosta and the person responded three-and-a-half hours, the late Valdosta State University English professor and World War II veteran took issue with not only the answer but the question.

He would remark travel is not about time, it’s about distance. The distance between Valdosta and Atlanta  is roughly 225-250 miles depending on the route. Time, to paraphrase the old Einstein saying, is relative.

Some people will say it takes three hours to get to Atlanta from Valdosta, some will say three-and-a-half hours, some will say four hours. Years ago, I had one buddy who bragged he regularly traveled from Valdosta to Atlanta in two-and-a-half hours by driving in the middle of the night and making sure his radar detector worked. 

But as we all know, how long it takes to travel to Atlanta isn’t always determined by how light or heavy our foot is on the accelerator. The length of time can change depending on traffic, accidents, road work, the number of people in the car and the durability of our bladders. Or in my old buddy’s case, if his radar detector failed and the police clocked him going more than 100 miles per hour.

Still, Dr. Cook was an adherent to what I call the Indiana Jones School of Travel.

In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when Marion looks at a battered Indiana Jones and says, “You’re not the man I knew 10 years ago,” Indy answers, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”

The Indiana Jones School of Travel places distance over time.

And while the distance remains constant and time is relative, the reason most people ask and answer how long as opposed to how far is because we are more concerned about time than distance.

We are people, not cars. 

A car, no matter the year it was made, is typically judged by how many miles are on the odometer. We may say it’s a 2007 but we will gladly add it only has 98,000 miles on it. Or we just bought it three months ago, but we will sadly say we’ve already put 13,000 miles on it. 

Cars are judged by distance. People are judged by time.

A baby may travel with her parents from America to Europe and back; however, we don’t say she’s only 3 months old but she’s already got several thousand miles on her. 

We celebrate birthdays, not how many miles we come. 

Even when something reveals how far we’ve come, people usually measure it in time.

After my grandfather quit smoking cigarettes, he could tell you to the day how long it had been since he smoked his last one. By telling people how long it had been, he revealed how far he had come.

Time is important to people.

We only get so much time. To paraphrase Death in Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” we each get what anybody gets. We get a lifetime. No more. No less. 

But some do get more. Sadly, some do get less. 

When we’re little, before we appreciate how fast time goes, and we think the world is about distance because everything is so immense, we sit forward in the backseat and ask in desperation, how much farther? 

But as we age, we ask, how long does it take?

Because when it’s all said and done, our obituaries may state we have traveled the world, that we visited faraway lands, that we served overseas. But our obituaries will not include our mileage. Our obituaries will record our age. How much time we had from the date of our birth to the date of our death.

How much time we had. How much time we were given. And no matter how much less or how much more, how quickly it went.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.