July is here, already, and I can’t help but to think that we are halfway through this year. Where did the time go? When I was younger, my elders would tell me, “Just you wait. The older you get, the faster time goes.” Well, I must be there because I do see time moving quickly. Yet, sometimes it seems it doesn’t move at all.
I thought about these summer days. How the many daylight hours and warm weather invite participation in sports, how social gatherings bloom, barbeques fire up, and the starlit nights keep us dreaming until the early dawn. How quickly yet another day passes. How quickly six months of a year has gone! Yet it never seems that way when lying on the beach under the sun at midday, standing over a grill in the late afternoon, or drinking sparkling wine among fireflies after dark.
Sure, we refer to clocks and calendars, the rise of the sun, and its setting, the phases of the moon and even hour glasses to measure time. Clocks have developed from sundials and water wheels to something more accurate, like pendulums and quartz crystals.
Yet, time really has no physical properties to measure.
What we’re really measuring is the duration that separates two events.
He seemed tall for his age, but then, I’m not sure what a typical height is for an almost nine-year-old. His athleticism showed too. He had a deliberate gait that was in control, a match for a swift slice of a hockey stick along the ice as he played in the Stan Mikita’s School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. He’s a grandkiddo of my husband’s stepson, and the last time I saw the first-born was as a newborn of three months. Counting his birthdays each year was mindful. But realizing how grown-up, independent, and mature he had become, wasn’t. It took the period of eight years to see how much time had really passed. And how he had grown!
There is a large oak in my backyard surrounded by a small circular carpet of grass. When standing inches from the tree, I can touch its intricate maze of deep crevices indented in thick bark that provide clinging feet of squirrels and woodpeckers in which to anchor. And a running track for ants and beetles and caterpillars, too. I recalled when I first met my oak, twenty-five years ago, when I moved into my new home. I envisioned a circular bench built around the trunk to sit under its canopy. Until the carpenter questioned its feasibility. There might be a problem down the road as the tree grows and the trunk gets bigger, he told me.
We measure time’s passage by how much things have changed. Yet, I can’t help but to see how measuring time . . . takes time.
I considered my tree—trying to remember its size then compared to what it is now—and I regret not implementing some form of measurement that would have shown its growth over those years. I could have compared the lengths of two different pieces of twine—one wrapped around its trunk back then, and one piece wrapped around it now—to see the expansion of the trunk’s thickness. Intellectually, I understood my tree had grown, but I perceived it as it once was so many years ago. Measuring its growth took time, all twenty-five years of it!
When I am outside in a natural environment, time feels suspended. I will only realize that hours have passed when I notice the angle of the sun has moved directly overhead, or when my walk in the woods has ended, or I have finished my work in the flower gardens. The time was measured between when I ventured out to when I returned, yet at some point I will eventually see how quickly the time had gone, how a newborn suddenly became a little-big man, how my oak’s trunk would have outgrown its circular bench, how half a year has gone, how time, indeed, is fleeting.
A few days ago I was driving through a neighborhood I had lived in some 15 years ago. I remember the young trees along the parkway. When I traveled down the street on this recent day, I was stunned at the canopy those young trees had now made. So much change that I did not recognize my old house, driving past it twice before convincing myself that “that was the one.” If this is the case with the life of trees, imagine our children, our parents, ourselves. Not sure I would recognize my 20-year-old self if I saw him walking along the street.
Thanks for sharing this memory! How time makes things unrecognizable, just like you said, you didn’t recognize your house.
Thank you Nancy. Another lovely rumination. As a young mother, I recall the saying, “the days are long, but the years are fast.” Somedays I would run out of activities for two young children by 9 AM, and wonder how I could possibly fill the day. And then all of a sudden they are graduating from high school!
We are lucky to live on the edge of the prairie, facing west. I know mark the year by the location of the setting sun, marching north until the June soltisce, then slowly working its way back as winter descends. My time is now measured by the setting sun.
I love how we still rely on the sun’s movement for our own inner timing, perhaps an ancient notion carried over from Stonehenge? There’s something so primitive about it!