It's that time of year again.
I began just before bedtime Saturday night, starting at one end of the house and working my way to the other. The stove. The microwave. The clocks on the walls. Clocks on bedside tables. Pressing buttons, turning dials, on and on and on.
My cats follow me as I go. They sit and stare at me quizzically, tails twitching. "Fall back, spring forward," I mutter, and they blink. They seem baffled at my odd behavior.
Inevitably I miss a few; or I change some clock that is designed to change itself, so the next day or two, I know, will be spent tediously getting the last ones in line. And I know that for the next few days I'll move sleepily in a world that seems oddly off kilter - waking up disoriented and dozing off in chairs, while the light tells me one thing and the clocks tell me another, until finally my poor confused internal clock wilI surrender and adjust to the change.
With every clock, I grumble and sigh in exasperation. This is such a pain! Why do we have so many clocks, anyway? Why are we so obsessed with some silly abstract number? And as I picked up the last clock, I paused as a thought hit me: what is time, really?
Time passing. The sun moving across the sky, the moon waxing and waning, the earth moving around the sun as the seasons change. Our corner of the universe moving in its long dance, hour by hour, day by day, and we humans trying to keep track and keep up.
It's a dance we do.
Right now, while I'm setting my machines to a number, out in the woods the creatures are building their nests and digging holes, or leaving to make the long trip south. They follow the dance of the seasons. We do the dance of the clocks.
All of our gadgets seem a long way from the music, don't they?
It wasn't always this complicated, but we humans have always needed to keep track of time. We measured time by the sun and the moon and the seasons. A stick in the ground gave us a simple shadow; a hand held up between the sun and the horizon told us how long before sunset. We were communities of hunters and farmers, and we needed to know how long it was before we needed to take shelter from the dangers of the night. We needed to know when to plant the seeds and harvest the crops; we needed to keep track of the tides for our fishing. Timekeeping was for survival, not appointments.
Then, in that wonderful ingenious way we humans have, we invented hourglasses and sundials. We fashioned candle clocks and incense clocks to mark the hours at night. Eventually in the towns and cities church bells rang the hours and the muezzins called the faithful to prayer. Slowly clocks and watches appeared, first a luxury for the few and then a necessity for everyone.
Now it seems like we're surrounded by clocks everywhere, keeping track of every minute. Time is a number that rules our days, poking us and pushing us forward. It's still a dance, but we do it to keep up with each other, not with the earth. Still, those clocks move us along, whether we like it or not, dancing through time.
My dance is a lot slower these days. And as I grow older, time seems more like an old companion, walking down the road with me. Every once in a while she stops me to point at the rising sun, the frost on the grass or the full moon, just to remind me. Time is still passing, but I'm measuring what's left these days, rather than running to keep up, and savoring each day as a gift.
Ah well. The world's still moving, and I'm grateful to still be here. So I'll do the clock dance tonight, and endure the confusion of the next few days. But maybe I'll go out and look at the moon more often, watching it wax and wane, just to remind myself of the bigger dance we're all dancing to.