It is a means by which we are able to plan the future and measure the past. Time is a focus. Often that focus, then, is time. The moment of death, interestingly enough, is not as sharply in focus, and so it should be. Death is less clearly an ending as our first breath is a beginning.
Time then is our security, our stability, an anchor.
On many occasions a New Year's Eve, a birthday, an important event proceeds, supposedly marking in time, something of significance. We build up a certain amount of tension and excitement waiting for that 'click' - the changing of time whereby somehow we are supposed to feel different, but so often we do not and we are left with an empty unfulfilled anticlimax, a disillusioned feeling. It is not because the event is of any less significance. Rather it is because we have not comprehended the meaning of time. We have tried to hang our emotional and sentimental feelings on a framework which is purely convenient or instrumental.