Time is a strange thing. It waits
for no man. My relationship with time, with the various implements in my life
that dictate, count, measure or take my time is one of loathing. I remember
being young, not significantly younger than I am today, and not being so tied
to clock watching, to the movement of time. I used to have hours, entire days
and nights, with which I could do whatever I chose; nothing if I so wanted it.
I know my life and the choices I have made contribute somewhat to this; I have
a full time job, which while is entirely intellectually freeing, nevertheless
requires timekeeping from me. In fact, it requires it in the extreme. I clock
in and out, I watch minutes slip away from me awaiting breaks, lunch, and end
of the day. I am assigned break times, but I will only go if the minute has
just changed. That minute is mine. I am bound
by time when I am there, and then I come home to work the hours away. I make
deals with myself: if I watch this for thirty minutes, I must then work for the
rest of the evening. I can read for ten minutes; no, twelve, but then I must start
again with my university work.
This, too,
is dictated by time. I am a student teacher, and being a teacher involves
planning every heartbeat of your lesson. I had no appreciation for this as a
student, and indeed I wonder if all my teachers faced their responsibilities in
the way that they should. Certainly, thinking back, I highly doubt if GCSE
English really required us to watch Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet quite
so many times, eh, Mrs Spicer? I digress. I go from watching a digital clock
for eight hours, to planning a three hour lesson into fifteen minute slots. It’s
all about those fifteen minutes.
Aside from
this, I have a bizarre relationship with timekeeping itself. No two clocks in
my home tell the same time. The clock on my phone is around eleven minutes
fast. My watch is around four minutes fast, but seven minutes slower than my
phone. The clock in my bedroom I consider to be reasonably reliable, but
looking here at it compared to my computer, it is about a minute fast. But what’s
one minute? My phone already thinks the hour has changed. That became surreal
on New Year’s Eve. My phone entered the year eleven minutes before everyone
else. It just had a wander around before we all got there.
I am almost
obsessed with time, with how much time has passed, or how much time I can steal
before I have to begin my next task. And this, I think, is the crux of it. I work
five days a week, and on the two days I don’t get paid to work, I go to
university one day, and teach all day the next, so effectively, I work seven
days a week. Every week. This is fine, I suppose, certainly it is a life I have
chosen and is without doubt a temporary arrangement, lasting no more than two
years, one of which is almost over. It is, however, incredibly tiring. Time has
become my lost long friend and my enemy. I am always trying to scrape what time
is left of the day after work to complete other work, or I am always counting
the minutes between my snooze buttons before they go off again. I do have six
of them. Sleep is something else I remember but barely experience. I spend a
great amount of time watching time, or feeling bound to it. Or by it.
So, is that
it? Is this obsession I have with time-not necessarily what time it is, but the
amount of time that has passed-a temporary thing? Will it be that once I get my
life back, once I have the luxury of a day off, that I will allow time to pass
without watching it so desperately? The other factor of time, though, is its
passage in the greater sense. My friends are all falling in love, moving house,
changing country, getting married. Most of them, it seems, are pregnant. Time
moves without you even as you watch it, and maybe this is my obsession. Maybe I
am consumed by every movement of time, because I watch it go, but I do not go
with it. Undoubtedly, I age, because time can do that to you even as it leaves
you alone, but the seconds, minutes, hours, years, they can still leave you
behind. You can see them pass, like fish in an aquarium, separated by glass,
but you can do nothing but press your hand against it. You can’t always flow
with time. Sometimes it flows past you.
I don’t
know. All I know is that it dictates a great deal of my day, and I wish I didn’t
care, or have to care, so much, about time. I loathe it as a result. But I have
spent enough time talking about it. I’ve got to get back to work.
