Time traveling
 
Contemplating our mortal coils at the turn of the millennium, we ... uh, oh -- time to feed the cat. Published: The Vancouver Sun, December 30, 2000, Op-ed column Deborah Jones When the champagne corks pop this weekend, a few dour die-hards will still be yammering on about the millennium really beginning this New Year's --scolding that all of last year's fuss was wrong- headed. They're party poopers. Why let the facts get in the way of a good bash, anytime, anywhere? Actually, the whole millennium thing makes my head hurt. The ache started last New Year's, when yet one more millennium boor cornered me to expound on arcane theories of counting years and express outrage at the celebrations. Really, who cares if, by the Gregorian calendar, only 1,999 years had passed as of Dec. 31 1999? Our preoccupation with slotting time into pigeonholes is pseudo- scientific and cloaked in semantics. At best, units of time measurement are artificial constructs set up to help organize human affairs. At worst they're straitjackets. And, frankly, we're more conflicted about the notion of time than is healthy. My family cat, Poppy, has a sane (for her) approach to the passage of time. At dawn each day she creeps into a bedroom and emits a squeak. If nobody rises to feed her, she moves from room to room, progressing from her polite "please feed me" to a full- throated concertina. Unlike an alarm clock, there's no way to turn her off. She has us well-trained to her timetable; somebody always gets up, she always gets what she wants. Then, as we plunge into our busy human days, she sinks contentedly back into feline slumber. Unlike cats, we humans shoehorn our natural rhythms into days divided unrelentingly into seconds, minutes hours. Animals, though less sophisticated, are in some ways smarter, moving to cosmic rhythms and biological imperatives. Each morning, as predictably as the sunrise, a sleek blue stellar jay swings over the deck of my house, beady black eyes peeled for the handful of seeds we sometimes leave out. Late each afternoon outside my office window, at a time that changes with the sun's cycle, a murder of crows wings eastward over Burrard Inlet, homeward-bound. Each fall, as the dark expands and the mercury descends, the black bears cease foraging for food and begin their journey toward their mountain dens and a winter of blissful hibernation. In the spring the bears sleepily emerge under skies darkened by clouds of migratory birds, journeying north in accordance with a celestial map and seasonal timetable that they have perfectly understood for as long as humans have imperfectly tried to "keep" time. Scientific research tells us that human bodies, too, adhere to the rhythms of nature. We naturally nod off in mid-afternoon. We crave the number of hours of sleep each night individual needs require. Our endocrine systems are flooded -- at mysteriously determined but precise times of each day, each season, each life -- with hormonal messengers that tell us when to sleep, when to mature sexually, when to breed, when to give birth. Deep within each of the myriad cells that comprise our corporeal forms nestles a delicate strand of protein-based material called DNA which, as certainly as the Earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits the Earth, determines how quickly we'll age and approximately when we'll die. Rhythms of time are inextricably, inexplicably part of us, and yet for millennia we humans have been in denial. If we each danced to our biological harmonies, of course, we'd be still hunter-gatherers living short and brutish lives in caves. I like my cell phone, my computer. I'm grateful for a snug house and health care technology that helps me when I'm sick. But quirkily, perhaps to remind me of the human-ordered system which makes it all possible, I keep the bank and identity cards that let me access my creature comforts in a red souvenir wallet that says "Stonehenge" on it. Stonehenge is a mystical symbol of how humans have devised ways of keeping time since the mists of time parted. Wandering around the mysterious 4,000-year-old stone circle last summer I marvelled at the deep understanding of the universe in which flourished an ancient civilization capable of so precisely marking lunar eclipses and solstices with a marvel like Stonehenge. Stonehenge, even, was modern by some time scales. Archeologists have discovered evidence that European hunters some 20,000 years ago measured time with marks made on sticks and bones. Every culture, worldwide, had a means of marking time. Modern human time passes according to a 365-day calendar, the first version of which was possibly first invented by the Egyptians in what we now call the year 4236 B.C. Mechanical clocks have kept time in the Western world since about the early 14th century, and today global citizens synchronize our timepieces by so-called atomic clocks, which measure the resonances in atomic particles as they absorb and emit electromagnetic radiation at infinitely precise frequencies. For all our wondrous technology, for the atomic timepieces that make possible radar and computer communication and the tone on CBC radio by which we set our clocks, though, we have but an imperfect grasp of the gears that make the universe go round. How else to explain the slippage of hours each year that requires us to make a "leap" in our calendar every fourth year? On a philosophical level, too, we have but an imperfect grasp of time. How else to explain how we cram our short and precious lives into mechanical schedules? There are news reports this week that pregnant women are trying to hold off labour, because families of babies born after Jan. 1 2001 are entitled to more perks. Astonishingly, they are trying to make something as profound as childbirth conform to an abstract concept of time. The pregnant women's hormonal systems, and the babies unfurling within their bodies, have no respect for, nor understanding of, mechanical time. These people obviously don't yet know that during childbirth, as with death, time is held in abeyance, suspended in a bubble that encompasses all participants, until the event has come to a conclusion on its own sweet time. As for the sweet time that is New Year's, I don't quite know what the strike of midnight this Sunday will truly signify on a cosmic scale. Personally (those who are close to me will snicker here in recognition) I have enough trouble keeping track of minutes, let alone millennia. Still, in concert with all the other people in my time zone, champagne glass in hand and family near by, on New Year's I'll happily count down (on the beautiful new watch my husband gave me for Christmas) the old year, and welcome in the new. Then I'll get some shut-eye. At dawn my cat, no respecter of human time, will be following her own timetable. And just like me, she couldn't care less if it's the dawn of the new millennium, so long as she gets breakfast. Copyright Deborah Jones 2000 About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted. Please contact me for reprint rights. All material copyrighted ../About.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
Rhythm of life squashed into seconds, minutes hours...
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