Did you know time used to be stretchy?
I was reading a book called In the Fullness of Time by Cathy Haynes, and in it she talks about the 12-hour Roman day. (Twelve, not twenty-four). The sundial hours were spaced evenly, but they shrank and stretched with the seasons. In midsummer, the “hours” might last twice as long as they would in midwinter. The book also mentions daymarks, which are landmarks used to tell the time a bit like a geographical sundial. Essentially, you picked a location—a hillside, let’s say—that everyone in your village could see. When the sun hit it in a certain way, you called that midday (or some such). You might have other daymarks too: “we’ll meet at the market when the light hits the top of that flat rock over yonder.” Not only would this timing slip and shift with seasonal daylight, it would make no sense at all if you were from the next town over. They would have their own daymarks.
I have been thinking about this an awful lot. Partly, because it’s spring, and the daylight hours grow steadily longer here in northern Ohio. Partly, because stretchy days remind me that time as we calculate it—is made up
Time does pass: we grow, we age, trees get taller, etc. But before clockwork, we didn’t have this bizarre adherence to seconds and minutes. And who came up with those seconds and minutes? Why twenty-four? Anglo-Saxons apparently divided the day in four parts, which would be further divided to eight and sixteen. And then we put 60 seconds to each minute, 60 minutes to an hour. But did we have to do it that way? Does time actually work like that?
I have sat in doctors offices for twenty minutes that felt like hours. I’ve talked to a friend for three hours and it felt like ten minutes. I’ve fallen asleep and had dreams that dragged on for years (in dream time), full of complex storylines and characters, only to find out I was in REM for about five minutes. Time… at least the experience of time… doesn’t abide by the clock.
Recently, I bought a box of twenty-minute meditation candles. It’s my attempt to take some time out to relax: when the candle is lit (so I tell myself), no thoughts about what I have to do next may intrude. But I’ve come to thinking of it almost as my “time out of time.” Supported on my favorite chair, deep breathing, I could almost swear the march of minutes ceases. The candle flame dances, but the wick seems interminable. It isn’t 20 minutes, surely—I have to have been in here as hour. It’s almost as though, when I slow my mind down, I slow time down with it.
That’s practically magic.
What do you think of time? Does it slip and slide for you, too? Tell us about it.
The image, by the way, comes from the astronomical clock in Prague. I was there in the way, way back… 2012, I think.
