Time

            We all (hopefully) remembered to adjust our clocks for the recent time change.   Speaking on the phone with my Grandmother yesterday, we casually contemplated the meaning of time.  With all her clocks adjusted except for the clock in one room that self-adjusts, but had yet to do so, my grandmother said she felt like she changed time zones whenever she entered or left the room.  This seemed funny to me; what the clock says doesn’t actually affect what time it actually is.  I shall go eat cheese-filled meatballs for dinner – yum!  Now I’m here again.  And yet, if I hadn’t mentioned my leave for meatballs, would you have ever known?  What to me was a lengthy, delicious pause in writing might not have even existed to you. 

While I initially thought that what time my grandmother’s clock showed shouldn’t have had any effect on what time was to her, I realized today that I was wrong.  What we perceive the time of day to be, or that of the week, of the year, et cetera, has a large psychological impact on us, and thus what we think and do.  If you think you’re short on time, you hurry more.  If you find out it is Friday when you’ve been thinking it was Tuesday, you might be filled with hope for the weekend, and act much more energetic.  Knowing that it is Christmas season has been proven to make workers more efficient. 

We do not control the flow of time; we simply live as “the leaden circles dissolve.”  Since we cannot stop the circles, why do they matter to us?  I think it is because we control how we spend the time we have.  I think perhaps we give time meaning, just as we give things in literature meaning that the author maybe never tried to create.  I’d suggest that you contemplate the meaning of time, but who has the time?