Spring Forward

The clocks changed again…or rather, we consciously chose to change the clocks and hurl ourselves en masse into a collective future.  It’s a dubious endeavor, this changing of the clocks.  No one particularly cares for the actual act of the shift.  But the ongoing effects are generally appreciated.  Longer days, we say.  Of course, the span of daylight is exactly the same, no matter what we call the hour.

It’s interesting to consider, though––isn’t it?––what the endeavor says about time itself.  It’s just…well, fashion.  There are cycles, of course––cycles of light and dark, waxing and waning, winter and spring and summer and fall.  There is change inherent in these cycles––but they always come around again.  The construct of time is the only thing that moves forward.

This is a striking disconnect, don’t you think?

I think we’ve got it wrong.  Nature does not move forward.  It ebbs and flows.  I contend that time does as well.

Hear me out.

When my son died, my world stopped.  Yet Earth kept spinning and traveling around the sun.  Eventually I spun with it.  And as the AD (after death) me looked to unfreeze the static parts of myself––looked to thaw and heal in a new day––I found my son again.  He exists in time.  In all time.  He exists now…and then…and tomorrow.  The season I call 1990 introduced him to me.  But I knew him…I knew him before I met him.  I’ve known him a long, long time.  The season I call 2019 dropped him from my physical sphere.  But I knew him still.  I know him still.

Time is nebulous.  We use it for…well, I’m not sure exactly.  Our schedules, I suppose.  But truth be told, I suspect that we don’t have to.  Not really.  I know, I know…it would be a tremendous leap for us collectively to let go of time and trust our natural ebbs and flows.  Not difficult….just against our training.  It may be a spring too far forward for us to handle.

I think that “time,” like everything else, is cyclical.  In the “now” I am also in the “then.”  My son is “then” and “now” as well.  So are we all, whether or not we know it.  Whether or not we see it.

It’s late now, and in my body’s natural cycle, it needs to sleep a while before awaking anew.  Which it will do again and again until this phase of my cycle is complete.  And then I will spring forward into a new now and then…but one very much the now and then of this now.

As the comic says, “Baby ate too much Spinoza.”  Probably with a side of Nietzsche con carne.

I may be right.  I may be wrong.  It may not matter.

And frankly, I’m not attached to whether it matters or not.

And that, my friends, is about time.

A word about this photo. This afternoon I sat outdoors looking up at the sky. I saw a heart in the clouds and received it as a message from my son. A couple hours later an online acquaintance (with the initials LM––incidentally, how I sign messages to my kid––for “Love, Mom”) posted a photo of that same sky, that same heart, with the message, “Love is in the air in our own backyard.” (Thank you for this message and this photo, friend, and for being a messenger!) Oh, how I love signs.

“Seasons change with the scenery; / Weaving time in a tapestry. / Won’t you stop and remember me?”