A reflection on time...

I’ve just completed two more weeks of retirement, which means I’ve lost a week, because I could swear it was only one week since my last blog.  I’ve looked everywhere, including my sweater cupboard, and it’s really gone.  It must be with my little black cotton cardie that I bought in England 5 years ago that mysteriously disappeared.  But it raises the question; if one of the things that I want to improve in my life, now that I am no longer a slave to the clock, is that time should flow differently, perhaps I should stop looking at calendars and parsing my time out in weeks and days.  I have the fond idea that time will pass more slowly, as it did when we were children, and actually slumped about crying, “will Sunday never end? I HATE Sundays!”  But if this disappearing week is any indication, I’m beginning to wonder.

My best college chum once reminded me that at ‘our age’ (and I think I was in my fifties then) something we think was 5 years ago was actually 10, and something we thought was 10 years ago was actually 20.  I’ve tested this, and she’s right.  If I give up using the calendar, I won’t even be able to be inaccurate properly.  On the other hand, what about ancient man? (well, ancient woman, really…she’s the one who had to figure out when it was dark and get the kids to bed).  People lived by the sun, and the phases of the moon.  (And in spite of their excellent paleo diets only lived to be 40...just saying)  Things would be marked out by descriptions of thing happening. “The time the mastodon trampled Uncle Og”  “The season of the great storm that swept away the annoying people who moved into the valley below” and so on.  What would be the modern equivalent?  “The time we killed that massive rat that moved into our couch and ate my lipstick.” (apologies to my neuroscientist brother who thinks rats are clever…how clever is a rat that eats two tubes of lipstick when with a little effort it could have opened up the bottom drawer in the kitchen and found the chocolate and crackers?)

See now, about that rat.  If I ask myself, or my husband, who wouldn’t thank me as he’s asleep right now, when we put out the trap that killed that wretched animal, he’d say, “six months ago.” And I’d agree with him.  But this morning I just wandered through my bookshelf and found one of my embarrassing diaries, and there it is: “October 14, 2012… “About that rat we dispatched…”  Almost two years ago! 

I suppose the point about treating time differently is that we have to be prepared to have it just go along, and try to enjoy where it takes us.  I am shocked that when I sit down to write a few words at 4:30, and I look up after a couple of minutes to wonder where my husband is with my gin and tonic, it is 6:30.  Two hours compressed out of existence!  I ask him to make it a double, and sit with my feet up wondering, in retrospect, if my cotton cardie has been gone for two years as well, and whether the rat took it.