Thoughts on Time

    I was not here yesterday and I have an excellent excuse...I slept in on a work day! I am not a huge fan of sleeping in to begin with. I try to go to bed at the same time every night and I need about the same amount of sleep, so I normally wake up at the same time...around 7:00. For some reason totally unknown to me, my body decided to sleep until 8:00 yesterday which threw the whole day out of whack. Several things did not get done as a result.

      I have never been a huge fan of alarm clocks, and for the last twenty years or so, I have not found it necessary to use one except on very rare occasions. As I said before, if I get to bed on time, I will wake up on time. Part of this comes from growing up on a farm where life was not governed by the clock but by the sun and the seasons. My dad used to rage about daylight savings time because it forced us to run the farm on a time schedule different from the world until we could get the cows adjusted to the new time. About the time they got it all figured out, we would have to change again, and cows do not change habits willingly!

     Time is all relative....who says that a day must begin at a specific time? Modern culture wants to start the day with morning, but our Jewish brothers and sisters start the day at sundown. I have been know to restart a day at 10:00 in the morning when it has become evident that if I continue to do what I have been doing, I am going to have a very bad day. A bad day is simply a continuation of a bad moment, and if I start a new day, the bad moment has no continuity. I also rather like the circular notion of time rather than making it linear...that means that days don't start or end...they just sort of roll into one another. No one point on the clock is any more valuable than any other, so that means my sleeping time has the same value as work time and play time.

      A final thought: many cultures have an attitude about time which can be roughly expressed as "start when you are ready and finish when you are through." I really like that idea, and am so looking forward to retirement when a part of my life can be run in that manner...it really sounds good, the idea of losing the clock for a while!