Setting time free

July 6, 2012 (posted late because I had no internet access)


     What time is it? Have I gotten enough sleep? Those were my first waking thoughts today, a day I had decided to spend entirely without consulting a watch. As if a clock could tell me what my own body could not.
     And, hours later, I'm hungry. Is it time for lunch yet? As if I needed permission from my watch to eat.
     It's hard to appreciate how much I/we let the movement of a clock set into motion the movements of our bodies, like wooden figures shuffling out on a track to dip and bow on the hour.
     When did we stop waking with the sun, eating at a hunger pang, making love in the middle of the week?
     Perhaps I am more sensitive to the demands of the clock because of my profession -- the news business. Miss a deadline and I risk holding up the newspaper delivery trucks, pushing other publications past their deadlines, postponing the increasingly urgent flow of information. I turn to the clock like children turn to their parents for structure.
     How unsettling then, how delicious, to have this week of vacation time, this day without measure -- literally. I floated on the pond today on a child's $1.88 dime-store air mattress and drifted along, half-dreaming for, well, I don't know how long. And that was part of the joy of it.
     The question is, when I return to the workaday world, will I be able to remember how timelessness feels?
     Will I be able to look up at that ticking dictator, the clock, and at least stick out my tongue before a next second strikes? Or say na-na-na and glance away when I'm so inclined?
     The clock, after all, is made up of tiny man-made parts, subject to malfunction, vulnerable to the next power outage or battery failure. I/we are made of flesh and bone -- far from immortal, certainly -- but if I had to bet on which of us would last longer, me or the clock, I'd say time is on my side.
     It's up to me what I do with it.