It is Saturday morning and I can gratefully report that I have nearly recovered from last Sunday’s time change. When I was much younger the twice yearly time change was not a big deal, it was simply what we did when the calendar said to Spring Forward or Fall Back. I generally did not like Spring Forward in those days – I felt the pain when we had to get up and go to church an hour early. But I never complained about Falling Back, the extra hour was easily spent by staying up and then sleeping it off.
My directional preferences changed when I had kids – little boys waking early every morning. I discovered then that I liked Spring Forward for the way it served as a nice adjustment. My life felt a little more manageable when 5:30am waking was called 6:30am.
Now it doesn’t matter which direction the time change goes. Turning the clock according to nothing meaningful in my life is simply hard. The external shift creates internal havoc and my sleep cycle takes time to adjust. Of course time change is a national conversation these days. The people say, ENOUGH! But the government……enough said.
I was thinking about this when I woke into Daylight Savings Time last Sunday morning, opened up Facebook and saw a picture that I had posted 13 years ago: David, two little boys, and puppy Ginger on a Saturday morning. It was the common stuff of our lives back then. A snapshot in time.
Time.
I reposted the picture and tagged it with a question – what even is saving time
???
I know those boys in the picture so well – sitting there on daddy’s lap (or the back of the couch) all caught up in story. And that yellow puppy. She delights and exasperates me, both. This easily could have been a picture I snapped yesterday.
In my memory.
But in the ticking clock that tracks my daily living, those two little boys are young men who tower over me. And on a foggy, wet evening last December, they dug a hole in the backyard and we buried our golden love.
These days, I think a lot about the nature of time. How it somehow lives apart from the clock that we mark it with. I know there are all kinds of philosophical examinations and explanations. And some sort of physics too. But I am on the clock to turn 52 years old in a couple weeks. In clock time I am long past that kind of study. I am simply speaking here from my lived experience: Time is Slippery.
I’ve recently taken a new angle on my 17 Beats project: Cut and Paste.
Here is one I made this past week:
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