Loose ends. New year

As the year draws to a close and the darkness of the days begins to lift a tiny bit, I hunker down and try to tidy up the loose ends of 2021, so that I can begin 2022 with a clean slate. Ha! Fat chance, as the loose ends far outnumber the days that remain. Oh well. I’ll just carry on, because, one by one, the to-do list items do get crossed off, just maybe not as quickly as I might like. But, eventually, each box does hold that lovely tick mark to show completion.

And, anyway, what is time but a construct that we can understand from a variety of perspectives if we open our mind to them. Take your pick from just these three —

Mathematical explanation by Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California, and Senior Researcher at Stanford University:  

• “…Most of us think of the time produced by our clocks as time itself. Yet the only thing natural about the time produced by clocks is that it is originally based on a complete revolution of the earth (or more precisely, the average of such revolutions). The division of that period into 24 equal hours — generally treated as two successive periods of 12 hours each (AM and PM), the division of each hour into 60 minutes, and the further division of each minute into seconds are all conventions — human inventions. In fact, there's a fundamental circularity in the way we measure time. The time that is measured by a clock is itself produced by that clock. The clock's time is independent of the flow of the seasons or the cycle of day and night, and is independent of the clock's location on earth. Today we don't give this matter any thought — time is what the clock tells us. But in the early days of clocks that was not the case. Indeed, so different was the time determined by the clock that the practice developed of indicating when a time given was produced by the clock by adding the phrase "of the clock" — later abbreviated to the "o'clock" we use today. With the invention of the clock, the basic unit of time ceased to be the day and was replaced by the hour. With clocks, people could correlate their activities to a far greater degree than ever before. And the ability to measure time in a mathematical fashion helped prepare the way for the scientific revolution that was to follow three hundred years later…”

Sociological explanation by Karen Sternheimer, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California: 

• “…Time is one of the most basic examples of something that is socially constructed. We collectively create the meaning of time — it has no predetermined meaning until we give it meaning. To say that something, like time, is a social construction is not to say that it doesn’t exist or it is merely an illusion, but instead that humans have created systems of meaning that creates the concept of time…” 

Psychological explanation by Claudia Hammond, British psychology lecturer: 

• “…In the last century, Albert Einstein’s discoveries exploded our concepts of time. He showed us that time is created by things; it wasn’t there waiting for those things to act within it. He demonstrated that time is relative, moving more slowly if an object is moving fast. Events don’t happen in a set order. There isn’t a single universal “now”, in the sense that Newtonian physics would have it. It is true that many events in the Universe can be put into sequential order — but time is not always segmented neatly into the past, the present and the future. Some physical equations work in either direction…”

From my own perspective, there is hardly ever enough time, no matter what, but to-do lists help me navigate my way through. My wise friend Lisa W. taught me that, really, we can accomplish no more than three things in any given day, so keep today’s to-do list short if you want even a snowball’s chance in hell of making your way through it.

That said, no matter the length of the list, checking off even one box brings me closer to where I (think I) want (or need) to be by day’s end. It’s rather like that fable about the young boy on the beach, who spends his days throwing stranded starfish back into the sea. An adult comes along and, essentially, tells him he’s wasting his time: There are far too many starfish stranded to make a difference, he proclaims. Oh, says the boy, picking up one more starfish, but I’m making a big difference for this one starfish, and he throws it back into the sea.

Right you are, little boy. You throw your starfishes back into the water, one by one, and I’ll make my to-do lists and keep working my way through them, one box at a time, regardless of how long it takes me to finish the entire list. Because each tick I make makes a difference for me and my relationship to the time I have today and tomorrow and next week and next year. If only in my mind.

Dear Reader, when the clock turns at midnight on December 31st, may the New Year burn bright with love and laughter and good health for you and yours.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation

Photo by Todd Trapani on Unsplash