Timing is Everything Michele Laughing-Reeves

Riddle #1:

What can crawl, can fly but has no legs or wings?

Riddle #2:

(from The Hobbit)

“This thing all things devours; Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down.”

What is this “thing?”

By Michele Laughing-Reeves

HHorology comes from the Latin words hora and logy, which means “any period of the day” and “the telling or speaking of,” respectively. When you’re young, you have plenty of time; when you are older, you seem to never have enough time. Cindi Lauper sings about how she’ll catch you and be waiting for you “time after time,” while MC tells you it’s “Hammer Time.” Meanwhile, scientists are still debating whether time is even a dimension. In the end, time is one of the things that we cannot control. Our perspectives and accuracy of time has evolved to the point of anxiety.

Measuring time started with the ancient civilization of Sumeria and evolved with the Egyptian obelisks and sundials. Later, the Greeks invented the water clock around 250 BCE, and then hourglasses were invented by a monk in the 8th century. The first clocks were built by monks in Europe, one of which is still ticking-and-tocking at the London Science Museum. Now, wrist watches are being replaced by cell phones, at least until the battery dies. Even with all this technology forcing us to be on time, we still wait hours upon hours for a chapter meeting to start.

In most western societies, time is a linear concept. There is a starting time and an end time. The movie starts at 3 pm and ends at 5:30 pm, or the Zoom meeting starts at 10 am and ends at 11:10 am, but that doesn’t keep people from entering late. In other societies, including Navajo, time is a circular concept, events and occurrences will “come back around.” Three or more generations ago, Navajos measured time with the four seasons and the day-to-day pattern of the Sun and the Moon. We wake up before sunrise and get all our work done before sunset. This would then explain why most elders have inaccurate birthdates. My late grandmother contested her birth certificate, she said she was older by at least a year; therefore, birthdays weren’t celebrated. It was other life events, such as a coming-of-age ceremony or a wedding, that marked the passage of time. Navajos used the seasonal changes to count years, the shape of the Moon to count months, and the path of the Sun to count a

day. Planting and harvesting crops did not require the Farmers’ Almanac and ceremonies, except for the Kinaalda, were held during the appropriate season. There wasn’t a need to start on a specific day or at a specific time. The emphasis was on living and doing and not on the time when it was done.

Regardless of whether you have the linear or circular perspective of time, we know that time is a valuable commodity. It fits the supply-and-demand model; the more time you have the more likely that you’ll waste time, the less time you have, the more precious it becomes. Time is a big part of our lives: we wake up to an alarm set at a specific time, we watch the clock when lunch time approaches, we check our phone every other minute until 5 o’clock, we double-check our appointment times, we triple-check our flight departure time and then again to see if we have enough time to make a stop at Starbucks. As the technology refines the accuracy of time, we try, with some effort, to also be more accurate in our arrival times. We can even remember the births of our children down to the minute. There’s something personal and special about knowing that you were born at 7:30 in the evening, because there’s a big difference between 7:30 am and 7:30 pm on July 4th .

It has been said that a lot of time and energy is wasted on worrying about the future, so it is better to focus on living in the present, to enjoy the now. If there is, for example, a job interview schedule for Thursday and it’s Monday, and you spend the next four days leading up to the interview being stressed and worried, then you have wasted four days in which you could be doing something productive or something you enjoy. The concept of time is intriguing, it is an abstract thing but has the capacity to dictate our lives, especially if you are impatiently waiting for the chapter meeting to make a quorum.

(If you haven’t guessed the answer of the two riddles, the answer is “time.”)

Dawn in Mentmore, NM; time to get out of bed.

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