Time Slides

Rainy Day

While mentioning that I wake up at six a.m. sharp almost every morning, without benefit of alarm clock or any other technology, I neglected to continue developing that line of thought as sufficiently as I'd originally intended to.

About six months ago, my wrist watch band broke. What has become gradually apparent to me over that time is that I don't really need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows. Or, rather, I no longer seem to need a clock to tell what time it is.

I wonder how this happened?

Thinking back, way back, I remember fishing in Michigan's lakes with my father. He often liked to figure out what time it was by gauging the position of the sun overhead. Similarly, to test the wind direction, he'd wet his finger and hold it up in the air.

I'm not sure whether he routinely left his watch behind when we went fishing, but we often seemed to be basing our fishing time on the skies overhead. It's possible that I started gaining this weird sense of time back then, I just don't know.

In any event, it seems like throughout the day I somehow can locate the local time with a few minutes, when asked. Eerily, I often can get time right to the minute!

I certainly hope none of this sounds like bragging; if anything, I mean this as an embarassing confession and it kind of weirds me out, to be honest. Anyone out there have a similar "ability?"

My dark suspicion is I have spent too many years working inside organizations where time really was held to matter. The last place I worked, for example, virtually every meeting lasted exactly one hour. At first, this struck me as an extremely strange aspect of the place.

Over time, however, I began to appreciate the predictability of this scheme. Being an exceptionally punctual person (except when I'm not), I was almost always on time, or even early, for these company meetings.

Having meetings is what companies do, as we all know. Now that I am a consultant, clients will always be asking me to estimate the time it will take me to deliver whatever goods they desire. Unfortunately, my innate or learned skill at telling what time it is right now does not seem to extend into the future, i.e., I cannot easily say what time I will start or stop writing any particular piece of copy.

As a lifelong writer, I've developed an instinct. If I sit down and stare at a blank screen (or piece of paper), and no words come to me, it means I'm not ready yet. This is a very important lesson to convey to writing students, because they often mistake the state for "writer's block."

But the truth is we are not blocked, we're still in the "pre-writing" state. In my case, I've gotten the assignment, I know my deadline, and my mind is working on it. Ideas are turning around in my mind, much as laundry swirls in one of those dryers with transparent doors.

Maybe someday, neurologists will achieve transparency into our working brains. Maybe my son Peter will do that. If and when that time comes, I predict that a scientist monitoring a writer's mind before she starts to write will detect synaptic firings very similar to those that occur when her fingers start tapping the keyboard.

Now, more than four decades into a career of writing and editing, I have come to love the pre-writing moments. It is like sweet anticipation of any kind -- eating a good meal, tasting a good drink, making love, emerging from an overgrown forest trail to that point where you first glimpse the blue lake below that is your ultimate destination.

No, there is no way describe time other than it slides. It can slow, tick by tick, when you are waiting for someone to call or for your name to be called, whereupon you enter the stage to perform. It can race like a wild river when you are swept from place to place on a book tour; or just having fun with your new lover.

Sliding time. That's my description.

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