by MJ Beatty

Created on: August 05, 2008

I have been having the "time" argument with my husband (who comes from a military family) since I met him. He cannot understand how it is that my family says "show up at dinner time" and everyone seems to know roughly, give or take an hour, when to trickle in and there are no problems with that. To him, you say "show up at 6:00," and the person getting there at 5:30 is too early and the person getting there at 6:15 is rudely late.

There's real time-Nature's time, actual physical time-and then there's this ridiculous thing about hours, minutes, seconds, get-to-work-at-8-because-8:05-is-5-minutes-late, man-made time that we have been pretending is real since the 1500's when Peter Henlein of Nuremberg, Germany, invented spring-powered clock. Years are real; they're the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun. Seasons are real time too: spring when plants begin to grow, summer when it's hot and dry and plants bloom and fruit, fall when we harvest the fruit, and winter when it's cold and plants are dormant. A lifetime is real time, but it is not a consistent measurement. It's just the time between when someone/thing begins to when it dies. Months aren't real, but lunar cycles are. And the day-the earth rotating once on its axis, sunrise to sunrise (but not midnight to midnight as these time-inventing Germans would apparently have you believe)-is the smallest measurement of real time. Everything else has been invented out of thin air by men who have sub-divided real time into fractions and pretend each fraction is an actual unit of time itself, all the way down to the nanosecond, so that they can be in tighter, more efficient control.

When we shake off the arbitrary constraints of man-made time, we will get closer to Nature (and presumably to our true selves). We'll be forced to stay in the moment and use our senses, so that we can know when it's the right time to do [fill in the blank]. Like cooking, for example: we put the fish on the grill, set our timer, then wander away and multitask (or watch a little TV, stare blankly into space, whatever), until it dings. Then we go back, take the fish off, and eat. Take away the timer (and therefore the concept of "minutes"), and we are forced to watch the fish, smell it, and feel it to determine when it is done. The whole process becomes one of mindfulness and connection with what we are doing. Work life would be more productive too. You'd show up to work, get done what you need to for the day, and go home when you are finished. The work day would be based on units of work, not time. for example, my job: rather than 8:30 to 5:30, I'd go to work whenever in the morning (allowing myself enough of the day to get done what I need to), and, say, finish three reports to the court, go see three families, supervise a visit between a child and their birth parents, and meet with my supervisor to go over my case plans. There would be no more "watching the clock" because the clock wouldn't determine when people could go home, getting their work done would. People would get more done, go home more satisfied with their day's work, and be more able to enjoy their life at home.

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