It’s About Time
According to state mandate (all states except Arizona and Hawaii), the time shifts backward one hour in the Fall and forward one hour in the Spring. We call it “Daylight Saving Time” (“saving,” singular). Most of us hate it, right? As for me, I get a little confused about the time of day for a week or so after the transition, but then I guess my brain accepts it without further issue.
It’s this time of year (and then again in the Spring) that I realize how many analog clocks I have. One was a five-year anniversary award from my employer. It’s a nice, polished wood piece good for a desk or a mantle (currently on the mantle). We were allowed to choose what we got for our anniversaries, and I like clocks. And what better way to recognize the passage of five years than a timepiece? That’s probably why so many companies used to hand out watches for employee anniversary recognition. “We really appreciate the time you’ve spent with our company.” This one will be updated sometime today…or maybe tomorrow. No rush.
Another one is on the wall in the living room. It’s much larger than the mantlepiece…purely for decoration. It hasn’t been updated for several years and the battery is dead. It’s nice to look at once in a great while.
One was given to me by friends a few years back. It’s a wooden Death Star with a clock assembly built into it (yes, I’m a nerd, and Ruth and Robert know it). It was on my office wall for a while but was replaced by an iron rose I gave to my wife for our sixth anniversary. I need to hang that Death Star clock back up on the wall where my wife’s Star Wars posters hang.
My brother-in-law makes watches (not the mechanism itself) and gave one each to my wife and me. Hers is Darth Vader themed, and mine is Storm Trooper themed (yes, we’re all nerds). They are both very nice, so we only wear them for special occasions or when dressing up for nice restaurants.
I believe all the other clocks in the house are digital. One in the microwave, one in the convection oven, one in the coffeemaker, one in the cable converters (in the living room, bedroom, and office), one on my nightstand. Then there are the personal clocks…one on my Fitbit, one on my computer, one on my work laptop, one on my phone (and one on my work phone), one on my tablet.
That’s eighteen working (if only for decorative purposes) time pieces! And that’s just off the top of my head…who knows how many I forgot. Is that a lot? I don’t think so. I’d guess that’s about average for a household. Plus, you can ask all your digital assistants, Alexa, Google, Siri, Bixby, what the time is, and they’ll tell you without hesitation. Just about any major electronic device has a clock in it. When I was a kid, I had a pen with a clock in it. It took the tiniest battery available at the time. But I’m sure it was impossible to find since there was no such thing as Amazon way back then…we had wheels and fire, but no Amazon.
Is our society obsessed with time? Everything is about time. Our existence is about time. Look up anyone noteworthy on the interwebs, what’s the first thing you find in the results? Their date of birth…followed by their date of expiration if they have one. Any historical event, the first bit of info is the date it happened. Any future event, the first thing you need to know it when will it be.
From the moment of our conceptions, we’re on the timeline. Your mother had a “due date.” Her pregnancy was divided into “trimesters” and she had neonatal appointments with her obstetrician. Your birth certificate has a date and time of birth. You had “feeding times,” “nap times,” “bedtimes.” You had a vaccination schedule. You started school at a certain age. You had a class schedule with lunch scheduled at a specific time. All your favorite cartoons and TV shows were scheduled to air at a specific time and date. When you started working, you punched a time clock, and you worked a shift. You had a probationary period. You scheduled your vacations, and you only got a certain number of sick days. You had scheduled meetings to attend. You had an hour for lunch or if you were busy, you ate at your desk. You worked overtime when it was over forty hours in a week. Or if you were salaried, you worked whenever. You scheduled surgeries near the end of the year when your deductible was met. You had a retirement age. And on your death certificate, you’ll have a date and time.
In between are birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and national/international days of this or that. We have a “witching hour,” “rush hours,” and an “eleventh hour.” You might be “killing time,” “biding your time,” or “pressed for time.” You might be having “a whale of a time,” or “the time of your life.” You might be “working long hours,” and you might be “short on time.” The number of idioms about time are…well, more than I have time to count.
We define time in terms of astronomical events. The revolution of the earth around the sun is a year, the rotation of the earth is a day, the cycle of the moon is a month. Then days are divided into hours, minutes, seconds, etc.
But besides these human divisions of time, there is a natural definition. Without the sun, earth, and moon, there would still be time defined as the fourth dimension, as essential to the universe as distance. It’s a basic part of the universe which has always been and will continue to be long after humanity’s meager understanding of it.
And yet it stresses us like no other element of human existence. We’re always late for something. Late to school or to work, late for a deadline, late to an event…probably most stressful, late for a period. We never seem to have enough time. That’s why we hate Daylight Saving Time in the Spring, when we lose an hour, and we love it in the Fall, when we gain one. Next February, we’ll gain a whole day to set all our clocks to right. Because we measure a day as twenty-four hours when they’re actually only twenty-three and fifty-six minutes. I think I’ll take that day off and do nothing.
-Big Steve