On Our Side

I am, I realize, starting to feel a bit compulsive...perhaps panicked... about the window of time that arrives on a daily basis, beginning just after I leave work and ending when I climb into my bed at night. I've found myself spending moments of time - sometimes short, sometimes long - throughout the day contemplating what would be the optimal use of my post-work, pre-bed opportunity. Sadly, all of this thought - and pressure - has effectively paralyzed me. Were it not for my near-nightly yoga class, I suspect that I would spend 75% of my evening hours frozen in a horrified panic, certain that I had chosen poorly.

What is this strange obsession that I have with time? I suppose that it is not so strange, after all. I am hardly the first human to have it, and it was perhaps even passed to me from another troubled spirit. For as long as I can remember, it has existed in one form or another. As a teenager and young adult, I filled my rooms with clocks. Digital clocks, battery-operated clocks, clocks that had to be wound regularly....I was generous with my affection, accepting of clocks of all sorts of appearances and of varying degrees of accuracy. In fact, I've always taken a bit of perverse pleasure from clocks that are not synchronized. The louder, the better. Let them all scream their perceptions of fading moments, argue our position in the universal calendar.

Now, in my kitchen, there is a clock that refuses to acknowledge daylight saving's time, and another that runs parallel to its nearest neighbor. The clock in the bedroom maintains - always - that the time is four minutes ahead of whatever the microwave says, and the clock on my cell phone considers itself superior, foolishly feeling secure and comforted by regular check-ins with a network satellite. The clock on the VCR has faded away, the light dimming as the technology inside its host machine becomes obsolete. In my car, the clock amuses itself by changing - periodically - without warning. I know always that it is not accurate, but never by what degree it mocks this illusion. I find this cacophony of time-keepers reassuring. The fact that time surrounds me in varying degrees of existence, but never in agreement, fills me with a sort of hopefulness. The truth, I think, is buried within this discord. If I could only find the time to discover it...