Daylight Savings Time

 "We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and a mystery."

-H.G. Wells

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about time and how it passes and how we perceive it.  Today is a magical day when we create an hour out of thin air, simply by collectively deciding that it should be so.  And I'm tickled by the thought as I wind my watch back.

Still being a Washington outsider, I am completely fascinated by the complex and paradoxical relationship that people in this city have with time.  People are obsessed with saving time, yet seem to have so little of it.  On the streets, I see a hundred restaurant and coffee shop signs promoting an order-ahead-save-time scheme.  With the best of intentions, dozens of people have told me to download an app so that I can plan my commute down to the minute.  People tap their toes and click their heels, and run down the stairs even when the train has already left.  Plans with friends need to be made a week in advance.  In a place like this, people work hard and efficiency, or perceived efficiency, reigns supreme.

But it strikes me that all the scheming and planning and super organization is like looking for lost change in the couch in order to pay the mortgage.  It's drops in the ocean.  All these minutes and seconds that we have counted and calculated so painstakingly, where do they go at the end of the day?  Do we use them to call our mothers?  Or listen to our friends talk about their broken hearts?  Or beautify the world around us?

Our thinking about time is broken even down to the very essence of our language.  I wish we could change our idioms as easily as we change our clocks.  We talk about having time and running out of time and losing time without any sense of agency, as if everything is somehow beyond our control.  But the longer I live, the more I'm convinced that we actively make time for the things that matter to us and anything else is an empty excuse.  How we spend our time should be a conscious decision that we make, not something that totally mystifies us.

And yet...

In the most important moments of our lives, we have no choice but to be completely mystified by time.  We are powerless except to surrender to its incomprehensibility.

I occasionally find myself falling back in time to dinners and lunches around generous tables with seemingly endless bottles of Chianti and so many borrowed chairs squeezed in that they barely fit.  Yet there is always enough room for one more.  And there are peals laughter and big stories and small stories and gestures and drama and bread with young oil. This is a place where hours pass like seconds.

And I think about the times when seconds pass like hours.  I think of the baited breaths reaching out desperately for the acceptance of another human being in moments of vulnerability, moments when words come in groups of three.

I
love
you.

 Or

Please
forgive
me.

These fleeting instants when we step beyond time or exist outside of it, these are the seconds and hours that make us who we are.  In the moments that really matter, there is no difference between a minute and a millenium.