Is it normal to refresh the inbox a thousand times hoping to
find out the date and time? The clock on my mantel ticks softly intruding into
my obsession laced digital world. It is mechanical, metered, and heedless of atomic
time. It comforts me and I close the browser …
I have a strange relationship with time. My family always valued
being on time, which was ironic given we were nearly always late. I, for my
part, had no real sense of time until third grade. But by high school I was a
slave to the clock. Urgency kicked in somewhere during puberty. Urgency to what
end I was never sure, but I did know the clock was ticking and I was deeply
convinced there were not enough ticks left to accomplish my unknown task. Over
the course of my teen years, as minutes proved to be seemingly endless in
supply, I calmed down. I timed the minutes. I willed the hand to move fast or
slow. I discovered that time is not as objective as we often think. I began to
sense that there was always enough time… as long as I watched it. When I didn’t
watch it pass, I noticed, it moved entirely too swiftly.
All through college my watch was my best friend—a nice
watch. Expensive. Reliable. As much a part of me as my skin. I found comfort in
the relative distance between the unnumbered marks, sometimes fancying them
close together, sometimes feeling them far apart. I knew how many steps I could
take in one minute of quartz movements, how many city blocks I could trek in five
cycles of the same. I was never late. Never early. I lived within those beats to a rhythm only I
fully understood. I was a master of time and always on time: always arriving,
as Gandalf once said, exactly when I meant to.
Then, sometime after
graduation, sometime after my mother’s diagnosis, I peeled it off and put it away.
I willed the hours and days and years to crawl. I made a decade for her in a
year. A lifetime in five years. But no matter how tightly I held and how slowly
it moved, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop time. And time ran out.
Death came.
On the other side of that finality, the clock seemed to
freeze. When it moved again, it blazed as if making up for all the elongated
seconds which came snapping back on me like an overstretched spring. Suddenly
everything had happened in the blink of an eye, but strangely, I felt so much
older than the five years allowed... It has been an eternity. Since I have
emerged from that space in time that I made for my mother, I feel the imagined
years in my bones and my heart.
I still have that watch. It doesn’t tick anymore, but the
one on my mantel does. The relentless ticking picks up speed. Urgency. There it
is again. Urgency for what? It is partly being gifted, I know—a common feeling
many among the 5% report. It is partly having faced mortality, I know—we tend
to think life is shorter after witnessing death. But it is also a lack of control.
Without clocks and calendars and minutes and rhythms the time moves as it wills
and I am left stumbling as I try to react. I ask, “Is there enough?” and I am too worried about what I will find
if I measure the minutes, too terrified that the answer to my question will be
no, to risk mastering time once again.
I cling to dates and appointments. I cling to arrival schedules
and package tracking. I fill my life with measures outside the ticking of the
clock. I rely on others to give me the next marker and feel betrayed when the
markers are unreliable. All because I am too afraid to tap back into that power
I once had—that power of moments. I take the vague view instead and avoid the
accounting of my mortal balance. I drift in the perceived immortality of
timelessness. But subconsciously I seek moorings in Dejet and thirst for Neheh.
I find myself looking at watches again, looking to cover the
invisible wound on my wrist that has been bleeding steadily since I ripped my
sense of time away. Every now and then I see someone talk about time in Kemet.
I see them talk about how time was fluid and how the prevailing view was that
all things happened in good time… but not necessarily in specific ones. I have
used those phrases to justify avoiding the clock, but the truth is that
specific times have come to rule me in the absence of constantly flowing ones.
I can only feel the fluidity of time when I can see it moving and when I can sense
the rhythms within it.
How strange is it that the illusion of the “designated day” will
only stop mattering to me when I am again aware of and accounting for all of
the minutes? How strange is it that to be less concerned with timeliness, I must
be more concerned with time? How genuinely odd it is to calm the sense of urgency
with the ticking of a clock?
*Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.*
Our hearts beat the same way the clock ticks—relentless and
measured. Our breath shortens and lengthens in keeping with our perception of
time. Dejet and Neheh are built into us.
It is never enough. It is never not-enough.
Time is part of the substance of being.
It can only be measured by its own rhythm
and it can only flow through that rhythm if it keeps moving. I really do need to get a watch. And not a digital one—I need
something mechanical, something that ticks. I don’t need atomic accuracy; I
just need a reliable metered tick.
You need a heartbeat
for your Ba.
I keep forgetting that Shai can speak....
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