Time Travel

In our “year of the great travels” a given span of time can easily seem confusing. Calendar time just doesn’t match up with my sense of how long ago something happened.

But the autumnal equinox of yesterday put down a marker. I’m amazed to realize that it was only six months ago when Stefanie and I were standing between the paws of the Great Sphinx as the sun rose on the vernal equinox. And appropriate to this enigmatic monument of timelessness, I struggle to make sense of a given span of time.

Travel makes time elastic, a sense of it created somewhere in the encounter with the unfamiliar. In heightened awareness and novelty of experience time stops following the dictum of “accelerating as we age” and begins to fold back on itself. Or wrap around double and triple until I get dizzy trying to track it. Like watching one of those machines making taffy.

2022 has been a year when it seems we only stop back home to move our stuff around and do laundry before launching off again somewhere. Maybe that’s seems kind of frenetic to you. Like running away from time. Maybe. But also running into a different kind of time, less in control than in wonder.