Time to Get Back to Keeping Time Again

Hmmm, is how we keep ourtime a privilege or a right?

We are now just over amonth away from Christmas. But it hardly seems possible. The warm and wetSeptember and October here delayed the usual signs of the passage of theseasons. We did not see fall colours until late October. The peak fall coloursdid not happen until early November. And even now, many of the trees are still stubbornlyholding onto their leaves.

At a time when we expectto start hearing snow blowers, the whine of leaf blowers still reach our earsmost days. But I contend that is not the main reason we feel out of step

In philosophical terms,time is an artificial construct. Albert Einstein once said that The only real reason for time is so thateverything doesn’t happen at once. We need to be able to situate ourselvesin time so our brain has a frame of reference.

But the way we measureor conceive of time has changed during the pandemic. As we were stuck insuccessive lockdowns and stay at home orders, it felt like time had stopped. Wefelt like Bill Murray living GroundhogDay over and over – except in our case it was COVID Day.

In those moments when wewere able to latch onto a sense of time, it was pandemic timelines that definedit. We got stuck measuring time in waves: the first wave, the second wave, thethird wave and now the fourth wave. We also fixed on the regulated stages ofreopening which marked the progression of time in frustrating stops and starts.

Am I the only one whohas to concentrate to remember which day of the week it is? I am pretty certainI am in good company in this respect. On more than a few occasions, I panickedbecause I saw a meeting in my work calendar for which I had not fully prepared.A moment later, I realized it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, so I had no reason topanic.

And yes, I will confessthere were a few occasions when I clicked on the Microsoft Teams meeting linkand sat there cursing everyone else who was late joining – only to realize thatI was 24 hours early.

Over the past 18 months,we have spent much of our time bidingtime as we waited for those in authority to give us permission to startliving again. The calendar became less authoritative than the bulletins issuedby Medical Officers of Health which all too often said in essence: Not yet, and we’re not sure when it will betime yet.

We stopped keeping trackof time because it did not have much meaning. But time did not stop. We justwasted the time we had waiting to be told we could start living again. BenjaminFranklin warned us that Lost time isnever found again. We should have heeded his advice.

I rather like themetaphor that time is a flowing river. Like water flowing under the bridge,once it’s gone, it’s gone. We cannot get it back. It’s time we that we diveback into the river and get back to keeping time.

We should not have letourselves be told that doing so is a privilege rather than a right.

~ NowAvailable Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: HuntingMuskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is alsothe author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel whichwas a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’swebsite at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog .

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