Wednesday, January 03, 2024

Time

 (This essay is from the early days of January 2022.)

“Time is an illusion.” — Albert Einstein

If turning the calendar over represents a time for reflection, it’s also a time for confusion. And what is “time” anyway? 

When I woke up for the first time in 2022 after going to sleep for the last time in 2021, we’d crossed a threshold I normally would have been awake for — only this time I wasn’t.

Either there’s been a marked decrease in fireworks around here or I was too deeply asleep, but the old year didn’t go out for a bang in my case. As if to punctuate that absence, a loud display of fireworks did break out in the area a couple hours later.

Maybe someone had lit an overly long fuse or was too lit himself to remember to light it on time.

Anyway, the main way we keep track of what we call “time” is by dividing it up into segments — work hours, meals, appointments, deadlines. We have to agree on these things to make our lives synchronize with those around us.

But then again it’s a different time at the same time depending where you happen to be in the world. So that requires additional coordination.

Maybe the hardest thing for modern humans to do is to float independent of time, waking and sleeping at arbitrary intervals, shaking up the clock everybody else is attentive to.

But that happens when you are very ill, or heavily medicated, or both, and it truly disrupts your consciousness. If you happen to be in an ICU, which is brightly lit, you also also don’t have the reference of natural light through a window to help you discern between night and day.

At that point you are truly lost to time.

When I was in ICUs, pretty much every other reference point that normally helps me trust my grip on reality faltered as well — the doctors and nurses who came and went became fantasy figures, dressed strangely and making odd sounds.

Images came and went — I saw things that are not there and mistook other objects for things they weren’t.

Sort of like one unending dream where I just kept trying to wake up but couldn’t.

I’m not saying this was all bad or all good but it was a state of suspension without a beginning or ending.

All of this came back to me in flashes as I slept, awoke, slept some more and awoke again as Friday became Saturday, December became January, and 2021 turned into 2022.

In the process I guess I missed the big moment.

Or I was just lost in time.

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