Second Wind

It's all relative.

I’ve been thinking about time lately. I should have “more of it” but it doesn’t feel that way. In truth you can’t have more time. Time just is. You can’t make it or reduce it. Time doesn’t care about your to do list. It happens regardless of you. We’re just observers/experiencers/voyageurs. We are in time but can’t change it yet doesn’t Einstein’s Relativity say we can all experience time differently? Or at least our perception of it. Clearly I am not a student of Einsteinian physics but I am thinking about my perception of time.

The Egyptians may have been the first to divide time into twelve. They noticed a year had twelve lunar cycles which led to twelve months, of 30 days each (they knew the year was longer than 360 days but like an eager junior designer were more keen on the integrity of it all). Wanting to divide the day into equal halves, they assigned twelve hours to daylight and twelve hours to night time. To make their system work seasonally they simply made an hour longer in the winter to accommodate longer nights rather than mess with the balance and beauty of twelve. After the French Revolution, when the French created the metric system, they even tried to change time keeping from a duodecimal (base twelve system) to a decimal system (base ten). It failed. There is only so far a salmon can swim against the current before it dies.

Did we conquer time or did time conquer us? I’m with the latter. Though I suppose with electric light we can fool ourselves into extending our waking day into the night. The solstice has just passed meaning the longest day is behind us and the days are already growing shorter. That is an odd phrase: to grow shorter. It is also cruel. It means summer begins by shrinking towards winter. Our days will contract for six months before they expand again. The Egyptians had it wrong but it was a valiant effort to bring simplicity to the complexity of time.

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