On Time

 

"Luminaries such as [Husserl and Heidegger], who spent much of their prolific careers on trying to fathom the subjective experience of time, concluded that it is one of the most difficult of all phenomenological problems to understand..." (1)

 

It’s four days to the New Year, and, perhaps not surprisingly, I’m thinking about time.  Not so much years…I can’t seem to look backwards with any accuracy.  And not in age…there again, how I calculate my own age (years or intrinsic feeling?) is a conundrum, and how I calculate the age of others by looking at them is futile.

Time during the day is easy…clocks ring, timers buzz, the sun appears and then disappears, often in a purple-scarlet blaze out the back windows that has nothing to do with the clock.

The week, however, is the strangest of all counts:  I know how many days have passed not so much by the calendar, but when the laundry needs to be done.  Otherwise, a Tuesday is the same as Thursday or even Saturday.  What day is it? is a frequent question I wake up to.  (Is this the day I put the trash out?)

Time is, and ever has been, my nemesis.  Nobody’s time (except my sister’s at 4pm when it’s time for crossword puzzles) seems to suit mine, or I it.  I’m speaking of daytime, hourtime, mealtime, even yeartime. People ask if I am free next month at 2pm on Tuesday, and even if I put it on the calendar, it doesn’t seem real.  Next month is a blank, calendar notation or no.

In that regard, I’m always amazed at people who can plan trips a year…even six months…in advance.  Who knows what will happen before then to challenge time?

I don’t bother any more trying to figure out why…it just is the way it is and I am. 

But I can’t help adding one scientist’s words:  “Our sense of time is often linked to our ability to recall past experiences, and disruptions in memory can affect our temporal perception.”  Hmmm.

 

It turns out that I am not the only one with a different sense of time.  A few days ago, I’d pulled Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat off a high bookshelf, thinking to explore further an issue with balance, this time in a narrative rather than the tiresome clinical way (I am nothing if not narrative in persuasion).  Therein, I found that the weirdness of time inhabits others, too.

 Mine, it doesn’t seem, is not what the med men would call pathologic, but there it is:  somewhere in the brain is a mechanism that regulates time by a pulse that doesn’t have anything to do with the clock. Or calendar (so often mishandled over the centuries, anyway, we might as well ignore it). Mine, like others, has a mind of its own.

If I had to guess, I’d say that I am much more tuned to the call of seasons for time, not only the four we also manage to misidentify (spring begins March 21? Not in the south or north, either), but also the subplots of each.  What seems springlike when the snowdrops pop up is only chapter one. When swimming temperature in the ocean arrives, and when it leaves, when the azaleas choose to bloom…all subplots. 

What day do sweaters go back into the storage box?  What day does wool become the friend against chill?  Or linen the breathability in sweltering summer…which usually ends here in October, by the way.  Those are the regulators of my time…the weather having its say as well as the mean temperature.

Even a single day regulates itself by sun or cloud, wind or rain, chill or mist or aridity.  The hours within begin or end later or sooner depending.  Mood, inspired by weather, can dictate my perception of time...even space.

 

But back to laundry-time, which changes with the seasons as well.  Less chronologically challenged housekeepers might be “Monday is wash day” types, but I’m not, and neither is my pile of soiled clothing, towels, sheets, etc., which seems to be as eccentric as I am with time.

Now that it’s winter, there are fewer of certain things to wash…shirts, slacks…and more of others…socks (I can’t seem to keep them in the drawer for long) and undershirts.  When spring ascends into summer, those items made in cotton and linen (thus ironing begins) also ascend in height in the laundry basket; though admittedly lighter and smaller, they take up a third more washing time than in winter.  The day doesn’t matter…some weeks it’s Friday and next Thursday, some weeks it’s Wednesday, Saturday and next Friday again.

None of this dismays me.  It’s part of the homeliness of life that something like when I do the wash tells me about the days passing.  There are so many other and better things to take up time than time itself.

Like art.  How long does it take you to make one of your cards, asked a friend recently as holiday-card season began.  I don’t know, I told him…sometimes five minutes; sometimes two days.  It depends.  I've had pieces of larger art take more than five years, but unless I happen to know the date of origin, I'm not counting.

  

Ah.  Perhaps I have found the ticking mechanism I travel with: it depends.  A nice subjective way of passing time.

Meanwhile, I wish to all a new year of good, whenever it begins for you.

 

(1)            Frontier Psychiatry. 2021 May 7;12:668633. Distortions: A Systematic Review of Cases Characteristic of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Blom, Nanuashvili, Waters