I’ve been waking to red-spotted Scorpio on the southern horizon every morning between 5 and 6 am. I’m aware of the slow clock I’m inside of, the hands of constellations changing so I can tell week to week time hasn’t stopped. Scorpio sitting in my southern view means summer is almost here, while I’m starting to forget when I last saw Orion, winter having moved out.
Morning at the kitchen table, I have to lean far over the wooden bench to see the moon set out the window, not where it set the morning before, a second-hand ticking in the sky that lets me know the days are spinning and changing.
The passage of time over the last year has been strange. I posted about the subject at the beginning of 2020 when time seemed odd enough, and then it was all blown to tarnation. I saw my first dedicated and prolonged use of happy hour. Gigs were canceled, leading river trips, giving talks, out the window. Time became more of what I wanted it to be, a fluid experience driven by day and night rather than marks on my calendar, but less lucrative. It’s been like the Arctic in summer where the sun’s path is a tilted hula hoop making laps around your head, no telling what time it might be, 9 in the morning or 7 at night.
I swore I wouldn’t go back to the hectic ledgers of time before Covid. I’d find other ways of making a living without packing in every week, my calendar looking like it either exploded or fell apart. That didn’t happen. My calendar has again exploded.
March 2020, I went backpacking with my two kids. It was the only way I could see them as they were with their mother when the pandemic took off, so there they stayed. I was coming in from the outside, carrying who knew what biological hazards. We kept separate camps and did not hug, but sat around a fire. We walked in stars and talked. We found a moment of our own normalcy.
We didn’t share indoor space until May last year, when we started to breathe on each other again. It was a hard couple months to be separated. To keep connection we tried watching movies at the same time, phones out, laptops open, a hundred miles apart, but someone would start a second early or late and lips onscreen didn’t quite match up with the words. Time was moving at the same pace for us one alpine pass and one long plateau away from each other, but we weren’t in sync. It felt as we were trying to reset all of our clocks, not doing it exactly right.
I’ve heard time is an illusion, something invented to keep everything from happening all at once. It is less perception than it is interoception, a feeling of the body and mind rather than an empirical observation. It is a force like magnetism, or a conundrum like gravity, or a web in which we all lie, some of us sinking more deeply than others.
A year has passed and I’m different now. I can prove it by looking at my journals, standing on the scale, holding my hands up in front of my eyes, more wrinkled from the sun. I remember Scorpio sitting on the horizon last year, same position as now. I remember the moon moving from window to window. This winter, Jupiter and Saturn came together and kissed, then moved apart as if finished with each other. Last July I camped in the desert of eastern Nevada with my kids and watched the arc of a comet across the sky, climbing night by night until it was finally gone.
How many of us have been reset over the last year? How was time measured in a high rise apartment or down at street level, binging movies, waiting for happy hour, or taking long walks as far away from everyone as possible? Now is that awkward transition that to me feels like fitting a freshly rounded peg into the old square hole. I’m trying to go back to what I was before, booking gigs and assignments as far out on the calendar as I can see. The clunky hands of a regular clock have begin banging again. I’m not ready.
Photo of my son’s hand shadow on rock art.
My, how I enjoy your words…thank you
Orion is still visible – low in the western sky in the early evening – but it won’t be long now before he disappears from our vision for six months. I will miss him. You say you aren’t ready for the clock, but you have done this before. You can handle it. We all can.
An epiphany. Thank you.
It will be a difficult re-entry for most. My boss knows not to expect me in the office much anymore, but I’m one of the lucky ones that can be productive from home.
Just beautiful, Craig! I think our connection to time is so personal. In college, I had a professor who refused to wear a watch. It reminded her of death; the moment when her heart would stop and a watch on her wrist would tick on freaked her out a bit. I admired her for her persistence, her rebellion against clocks but not time itself. For some reason, I think the idea of death didn’t bother her.
About me, when I was in middle school, I would take these long solo runs after school. If I left when the sun was at a certain point in the sky, I knew I’d have 40 minutes of time to run around the same field a mile from my house before the darkness descended. I enjoyed those runs more for my reliance on what I saw happening in the sky. I seemed to know better where I was in the world.
Thanks Craig. Your words hang like last autumn’s planets just before sunrise. I spent much of last year camping out in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Furloughed then laid-off from my work. I witnessed Colorado Plateau skies empty of jet contrails, the likes of which I will never witness again in my lifetime. The first morning camping on The Comb, I remember my morning coffee walk, stopping to absorb the space and hearing only the blood moving through my ears. Was it quieter than it had been 800 years prior? I don’t know but there was something prehistoric and magical to that moment. There were small highlights of the covid year amidst all the tragedy, if you looked closely. The possibilities still echo around inside my soul. I drift into sleep thinking about a world slower, quieter, perhaps satiated with what we have in front of us rather than what we want.
As someone who still worked through it all, as if everything was still the same, I watched with a strong degree of envy in those first few months. All those people not at work, enjoying/indulging/suffering/enduring this new sense of time. This has only reminded me that time is different for everyone, as is the strength of its meaning.