Time to stand and stare

Snow fell yesterday, transforming the landscape in just a few hours. It's numbing beauty quietened the landscape as if time had paused and invited a moment of immersion in a new purged landscape of blue, white and silver.

Sometimes it's hard to stop, but with very little energy, I had to take a day off. A day off in my holiday... perhaps we beat ourselves up too much, always needing to be productive. It's good to have off days too.

We live in a destructive machine age, where time is something to beat. We're always running out of time, time is against us, time is not on our side. Our language speaks of an embattled relationship with something that does not actually exist. People say time is speeding up. It is, we are creating this speed through our own rushing.

The Gregorian calendar dates back to Pope Gregory XIII in a decree signed on 24 February 1582, although in the UK it was not adopted until much later (1752). The idea was to solve mathematical problems with extra days rather than to be in tune with the cycles of nature. According to Mayan scholar Jose Arguelles our calendar fails to balance solar and lunar elements and ignores natural cycles and creates an imbalance that has far reaching effects. He argues for a thirteen month calendar (13 months of 28 days with a day out of time for celebration and forgiveness of debts at the end of each year), which aligns with the moon's cycles around the earth as well as the solar cycle. As he says:

'Condition the mind to an irregular standard and the mind will adjust to disorder and chaos as normal aspects of existence. Our civilisation is based on false time and artificial time has run out for humanity.'

According to the Dr Deepak Chopra our loss of connection due to artificial timing also causes us to age faster. However there is no universal agreement on exactly what calendar could be adopted to update the one we have, though perhaps in the long term it will change, even though it seems unlikely now, we were after all, following the Julien calendar of Julius Caesar less than 300 years ago (in the UK).

Calvin Luther Martin writes:

'Our ancestors first became enslaved to the clock when they began systematically enslaving plants and animals in what scholars politely call the agricultural (or Neolithic) revolution.'

If you don't think that time dominates your life, try being aware for a day at exactly how it does just that. I find myself saying 'I don't have time,' all the time. I look at the clock and think, 'Oh no, it's late already and I haven't done....' The calendar holds together the fabric of our society, throw it away and our civilisation would descend into chaos, change it for a better calendar and could we find ourselves feeling more synchronised to cosmic and earthly cycles and somehow better in ourselves? It's food for thought.

Living out of time has a certain appeal. Letting the days and seasons announce themselves. Sometimes when we don't have to be anywhere, we can feel something of the magic of not knowing or caring whether it is Wednesday or Thursday. One of my favourite books is Thoreau's classic 'A Cabin in the Woods,' where he wrote of his time living out of normal society in a wooden cabin he built himself. It is noticeable that he wrote of his two year stay in a non-chronological way. This slightly irritated me at first, until I understood why.

'As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only signed at a distance because he could not overcome him.' (Thoreau)

Time here, sounds like Death, which I suppose it is in a sense, or at least it is due to our fear of death that we try to fight against non-existent time.

Yesterday I tried not to fight with time. I let the snow stop me. I'm on holiday anyway, so why not abandon schedules and feelings of 'I've wasted time, I've got nothing done.' We are human beings, not human doings. Today is a day out of time, to be creative, to muse, listen to music, potter, plant a few seeds ready for spring, feed the birds, walk in the snow and let it fall without recrimination.

Dylan Thomas's lyrical poem 'Fern Hill' is about the gradual hold that time takes on us as we grow up. The final verse here (but it's worth reading the whole thing):

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Would you like to live out of time for a while? You have done it before, remember when you were very young and you didn't know when your birthday was? In the halycon days when the grownups took care of worrying things like time.