Time Lost and Gained
This is the 50th issue of the Ski Lift newsletter—where has the time gone? On Monday, something will happen that hasn't happened since March 16—you won't receive one of these newsletters in your inbox. Don't celebrate just yet, you'll have another one waiting for you on Tuesday morning but I've decided to cut the frequency of these letters to just once a week. This is not because I have any diminished desire to write them or because I've run to the end of things this fascinating world produces to write about but it's simply a matter of time. As I write this, I am waiting for water to boil so I can sterilize a batch of new bottles destined for my forthcoming daughter. Before they've run their course, I (and certainly others) will wash these bottles thousands of times before they will be retired or, God forbid, recycled for a new sibling. The Samis of northern Finland measure distance in what they call poronkusema, the length of earth a reindeer can walk before needing to relieve themselves. These bottles will embark on what I'm calling a butticusema, the length of time it takes for a newborn to prefer a sippy cup. Despite the behavior of certain martyrish parents, having children doesn't make you love the things you loved before any less—I will still adore reading and watching movies and writing this newsletter—but it does, early on, restrict the amount of time you have to devote to them. Simply put, to continue reading five books and watching five movies a week, writing about them all while keeping a small child alive will require something none of us can pull off: adding more hours to the day.
And how many hours are there? Well, that depends. We all know, or should, that a day is one rotation of the earth on its axis but it is never exactly twenty-four hours long. Because of the tides, weather patterns and shifts in teutonic plates, the earth is continually changing its speed, which means the length of a day is never quite the same. On average, a day is a fraction of a second shorter than twenty-four hours but days have been recorded that are nearly a whole minute shorter or longer. This is all true, by the way, but here's a pro-tip for you: should you be discussing something scientific that you don't totally understand yourself but want to encounter as few questions as possible, start your sentence "Because of the tides..." Tidal patterns are incredibly complex but seem simple so they rarely get much pushback should you blame them for some phenomena or other. As I understand it, the tides cause friction in the earth's rotation, either resisting it or coaxing it along, which is why the days are inconsistent.
So if a day isn't set, how about the units of a day? More trouble lies that way, I'm afraid. See, when we talk about time (which we do a lot, by the way, it's the most used noun in the English language) most of us are referring to Greenwich Mean Time, the official record of the solar day. But there is also Coordinated Universal Time, the standard of the atomic day, which adjusts for the inconsistencies in the earth's rotation. The solar day recognizes the earth's changing speeds but doesn't get too worried about them, adding a leap day every four years so we don't end up with 90° Februaries (though reader Dr. Glisan would have me mention that we are headed that direction anyway). The atomic day is more accurate in the moment but harder to calculate. You might think of a second as a fraction of the day but atomic timers define it as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom." Good luck explaining that to your kids. To me, it seems the Incas had it right, they based their measurement of time on how long it took to boil a potato. That's as good as anything. No scientific experiment has ever been done that even proves that time exists. So while we can't agree on what the time is, we can at least concur that it's funky.
For most of us, time is merely a measurement and we rate ourselves on how to use it. Your car will spend 96% of its life parked. You and I will spend more than a year in pitch darkness from blinking throughout our lives. The last words of Henry Royce, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, were "I wish I had spent more time in the office." We know that it takes a ray of light about eight minutes to get from the sun to the earth but that same photon takes 40,000 years to get from the sun's core to the surface. We measure our days and lives not by seconds and hours but by moments, milestones and, dare I say it, by daylights, by sunsets
by midnights, by cups of coffee. The Navajo measure their children's development by their laughter, throwing a party the first time a baby giggles, where the person who made the baby laugh brings the food. And often, time doesn't have any meaning at all. The Italians have a word I love, asolare, which means to pass time in a delightful but meaningless way. On June 19, when little Josephine Grace Renkoski is to be born, I'll have a little less time to asolare, which is just fine. The Italian word for parenting is "genitorialità" which very well should mean to pass time in a delightful but meaningful way.
Nothing proves the elasticity of time like children, of which is said that they lengthen the days but speed up the years. Too true. We watched our nephews last weekend and midway through our latest game of "Destroy Everything In Uncle's House" one of them looked up at me with a face smeared with the remnants of his fourteenth snack asked me how much time we had left to play. I told him that his mother would be picking him up in about 45 minutes.
"Is that a long time or a short time," he asked.
"In the grand scheme of things, it's very short," I replied. "But for some it will feel like an eternity."