Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life - Posts Tagged "time"
No time at all
What colour is the sky?
I watched the sun go down tonight from the roadside. For once, the camera had not come with me… I was just driving to the shop and didn’t pick it up, so all I had was the cell phone. Even so.
I cursed myself for leaving the camera as I saw the huge, golden orb shot with crimson reflected in the rear view mirror. Too late to turn and go back, the sun would have gone by then… but maybe, just maybe, I would be home in time…
No. Halfway home it was evident I wouldn’t make it, so, camera or not, I pulled over to watch the setting glory of a perfect summer’s day.
It took only a couple of minutes for the last of the blue to fade through a rainbow of colour to a molten sky, aflame against the silhouetted trees. Almost as if the sky was clothed in the colours of the School…I couldn’t help but smile.
It was the speed of those final moments, though, that struck me. In the space of just a few heartbeats dusk became sunset and night swallowed the earth. The change came with incredible swiftness and was complete.
It made me think how fast our little planet is spinning, unnoticed by we who live and breathe her air. Hurtling through space around the sun at around 70,000 miles an hour, rotating on its own axis at around a thousand miles an hour at the equator… and we are so habituated to that movement we never notice. Yet, we get motion sickness in a vehicle….
Our eyes and brains process light that hits a speed of 670 million mph…and we don’t bat an eyelid at that constant miracle. Our field of vision seems infinite… even I, short-sighted as I am, think nothing of glancing up to say hello to Orion, capturing in my gaze light which left the nebula nearly 1350 years and nine trillion miles ago to meet my eyes tonight. Some of the stars I see no longer even exist!
Yet I have trouble getting to grips with the fact that my son is calling me from ‘the future’ when he phones me from Singapore….
Odd, isn’t it?
We live our lives against the backdrop of an enormity of time, yet it often seems that all we know can change in a heartbeat. A single moment, a scintilla of time, and life can be transformed, becoming unrecognisable, both for better or for worse. It can be a small thing that changes a mood, moving a day from sadness to joy, or it can be the bigger events that upheave a lifetime.
Just like the movement of the earth, we often don’t even notice how these changes begin. Or even at all. Sometimes we think we can trace them back to a particular and pivotal event, if we look… but it is hard, if not impossible, to untangle the skein of a lifetime, and the further you try and trace an event’s beginning back to its roots, the more apparent it becomes that you cannot do so, for each event is dependent in some way upon the ones that preceded it and brought you to that point in time.
We cannot alter past events and the future is unscripted… which leaves us with now, this moment, this scintilla of time, in which to change our worlds. And we do so. All the time. And don’t even notice.
I deliberately took time to pull over and watch the sunset tonight. It is something that happens every day, something that has happened over my head 20,023 times since I was born and which I seldom consciously take time to watch. I have to ask myself how many of those days of my life I have missed, simply by taking them for granted and not drinking in each moment in full awareness of the possibilities they hold, not living with a passion.
Tonight the sky was a rainbow veil that turned to a sea of molten gold. I never want to take that for granted again.
I watched the sun go down tonight from the roadside. For once, the camera had not come with me… I was just driving to the shop and didn’t pick it up, so all I had was the cell phone. Even so.
I cursed myself for leaving the camera as I saw the huge, golden orb shot with crimson reflected in the rear view mirror. Too late to turn and go back, the sun would have gone by then… but maybe, just maybe, I would be home in time…
No. Halfway home it was evident I wouldn’t make it, so, camera or not, I pulled over to watch the setting glory of a perfect summer’s day.
It took only a couple of minutes for the last of the blue to fade through a rainbow of colour to a molten sky, aflame against the silhouetted trees. Almost as if the sky was clothed in the colours of the School…I couldn’t help but smile.
It was the speed of those final moments, though, that struck me. In the space of just a few heartbeats dusk became sunset and night swallowed the earth. The change came with incredible swiftness and was complete.
It made me think how fast our little planet is spinning, unnoticed by we who live and breathe her air. Hurtling through space around the sun at around 70,000 miles an hour, rotating on its own axis at around a thousand miles an hour at the equator… and we are so habituated to that movement we never notice. Yet, we get motion sickness in a vehicle….
Our eyes and brains process light that hits a speed of 670 million mph…and we don’t bat an eyelid at that constant miracle. Our field of vision seems infinite… even I, short-sighted as I am, think nothing of glancing up to say hello to Orion, capturing in my gaze light which left the nebula nearly 1350 years and nine trillion miles ago to meet my eyes tonight. Some of the stars I see no longer even exist!
Yet I have trouble getting to grips with the fact that my son is calling me from ‘the future’ when he phones me from Singapore….
Odd, isn’t it?
We live our lives against the backdrop of an enormity of time, yet it often seems that all we know can change in a heartbeat. A single moment, a scintilla of time, and life can be transformed, becoming unrecognisable, both for better or for worse. It can be a small thing that changes a mood, moving a day from sadness to joy, or it can be the bigger events that upheave a lifetime.
Just like the movement of the earth, we often don’t even notice how these changes begin. Or even at all. Sometimes we think we can trace them back to a particular and pivotal event, if we look… but it is hard, if not impossible, to untangle the skein of a lifetime, and the further you try and trace an event’s beginning back to its roots, the more apparent it becomes that you cannot do so, for each event is dependent in some way upon the ones that preceded it and brought you to that point in time.
We cannot alter past events and the future is unscripted… which leaves us with now, this moment, this scintilla of time, in which to change our worlds. And we do so. All the time. And don’t even notice.
I deliberately took time to pull over and watch the sunset tonight. It is something that happens every day, something that has happened over my head 20,023 times since I was born and which I seldom consciously take time to watch. I have to ask myself how many of those days of my life I have missed, simply by taking them for granted and not drinking in each moment in full awareness of the possibilities they hold, not living with a passion.
Tonight the sky was a rainbow veil that turned to a sea of molten gold. I never want to take that for granted again.
Killing time
I drove back from the north cross-country yesterday as usual, avoiding the motorway rush hour and revelling in the landscape. About half past eight the roads were pretty awful as I approached the end of the hills. I had taken a wrong turn and thought, ‘Oh well’… it was as good a road as any other. I’m not really sure there is more than one road… just many tributaries like a river, all flowing into one. So I carried on.
As the traffic built I had a choice… sit in a queue of metal boxes… or investigate that little brown rad sign that said ‘Roman Site’…. No contest really. I’m a sucker for little brown heritage signs….
So I turn the car right and find myself on a section of Watling Street… one of the old Roman Roads that still criss-cross the country. I live on the course of another of them… where Akeman Street once ran.
A small crossroads and a section of unmistakable Roman masonry in a farm wall….salvaged from the ruins in the far distant past. I had no idea what to expect… no idea what was supposed to be there… no idea, even, if at that time of morning the site would be manned, open, accessible... or worth visiting at all.
I drove through the tiny village named, appropriately enough, Wall, and found a little carpark next to the village library. I approve of this library… it is spectacular. And tiny. The old red telephone box has been shelved and left open for anyone to borrow books from its confines. Opening the door felt quite surreal… as if Terry Pratchett’s L-space ought to be in full manifestation within its miniature halls.
Walking through the silent, mist shrouded village I found the remains of the Roman baths of Letocetum in a sheltered field of impossibly green grass. The early morning mist lent a strange, unearthly feel to the place and it was easy to slip beyond time and see the walls high and colourful, crowded with people, children running and laughing in the sunshine…
The first Roman camp here dates back around two thousand years, though the town… one of the most important in the land, it seems, grew up much later… and the land had been settled before. These quiet moments stretch the tapestry of human history at our feet and invite us to walk through its rich colour and imagery, seeing ourselves reflected both backward and forward in time as if time no longer holds sway.
Above the baths stands a tiny church on a site where it is thought a temple to Minerva may once have stood. It was a perfect vantage point to see the whole site and the landscape around, so of course I wandered up there, scattering partridges with my intrusion. The church was open, early though it was, and revealed some beautiful stained glass windows… only a couple of hundred years old… mere babes in that greater tapestry... yet telling stories that reach back even further, beyond recorded history.
I had stopped to ‘kill time’ as the saying goes, and it felt rather like that was true… as if our concept of time were some imaginary monster that could be slain with the point of attention… yet nebulous and fragile…moulding itself to our need to measure our journey through it, yet ceasing to exist the moment we look at it directly…a ghostly shadow vanishing under scrutiny.
These moments outside of time are a beautiful antidote to the incessant ticking of the clock and the mirror that dances with our wrinkles to its rhythm.
As the traffic built I had a choice… sit in a queue of metal boxes… or investigate that little brown rad sign that said ‘Roman Site’…. No contest really. I’m a sucker for little brown heritage signs….
So I turn the car right and find myself on a section of Watling Street… one of the old Roman Roads that still criss-cross the country. I live on the course of another of them… where Akeman Street once ran.
A small crossroads and a section of unmistakable Roman masonry in a farm wall….salvaged from the ruins in the far distant past. I had no idea what to expect… no idea what was supposed to be there… no idea, even, if at that time of morning the site would be manned, open, accessible... or worth visiting at all.
I drove through the tiny village named, appropriately enough, Wall, and found a little carpark next to the village library. I approve of this library… it is spectacular. And tiny. The old red telephone box has been shelved and left open for anyone to borrow books from its confines. Opening the door felt quite surreal… as if Terry Pratchett’s L-space ought to be in full manifestation within its miniature halls.
Walking through the silent, mist shrouded village I found the remains of the Roman baths of Letocetum in a sheltered field of impossibly green grass. The early morning mist lent a strange, unearthly feel to the place and it was easy to slip beyond time and see the walls high and colourful, crowded with people, children running and laughing in the sunshine…
The first Roman camp here dates back around two thousand years, though the town… one of the most important in the land, it seems, grew up much later… and the land had been settled before. These quiet moments stretch the tapestry of human history at our feet and invite us to walk through its rich colour and imagery, seeing ourselves reflected both backward and forward in time as if time no longer holds sway.
Above the baths stands a tiny church on a site where it is thought a temple to Minerva may once have stood. It was a perfect vantage point to see the whole site and the landscape around, so of course I wandered up there, scattering partridges with my intrusion. The church was open, early though it was, and revealed some beautiful stained glass windows… only a couple of hundred years old… mere babes in that greater tapestry... yet telling stories that reach back even further, beyond recorded history.
I had stopped to ‘kill time’ as the saying goes, and it felt rather like that was true… as if our concept of time were some imaginary monster that could be slain with the point of attention… yet nebulous and fragile…moulding itself to our need to measure our journey through it, yet ceasing to exist the moment we look at it directly…a ghostly shadow vanishing under scrutiny.
These moments outside of time are a beautiful antidote to the incessant ticking of the clock and the mirror that dances with our wrinkles to its rhythm.
