The Thing About Time

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I went to sleep early, so of course I’m awake now. It’s almost 2:30am … time being relative, not anything more than “what’s on TV right now or later” or “what did I miss on TV” or “is it dark” or “is it light” outside. “Early” in terms of “I went to sleep early” means, I went to bed before I normally do, before the normal way of being is done and ready to retire. I’m not one to “normally” go to bed before 10pm. In the Winter 10pm is later than it is in the Summer. I like Summer time better than Winter time, truth be told.

I am not a morning person. I’ve written about that topic before. I’m a “night-owl” so it’s the nights that I do get to sleep earlier than I generally will not sleep much, just a deep or light sleep earlier and then “wakefullness” sets in.

This is normal for the abnormal part of my sleep habits.

What happens next is up to what is slated to go on the day that follows. So in this case, just nothing special, it will be that by 4 or 5 or 6 I might go back to sleep, and maybe I’ll stay awake until the sun peeps over the edge of the world, but then I’ll fall asleep hard for an hour or two. That’ll do me for the day.

I sometimes will go in spurts of early to bed and then sleep the whole night. Not really spurts, lets just say, once or twice in a row every blue moon. I do go in spurts with “more sleep” that are not patterned except for being some odd piece of a puzzle that doesn’t make any sense from THIS perspective of watching how I spend my time.

It’s me to stay up late. Night Owls love the night. I have been one for sure most all my life. When I was younger it was reading that brought it out most definitely. At night the world quiets down around where you are. I do not mean everyone experiences this, but generally speaking the night air softens sounds, and if you are in a night life theatrical-ish area don’t put this general rule on the techno/human lights and sounds broadcast and complain that I’m wrong. The whole thing is right, and it’s exactly this: that softening is a cushion, night air envelops you into a cocoon and any noise that is made seems to boom quite easily. But it’s a night boom, which is so very different from daytime noise.

Daytime noise is so very busy. I am sluggish in the morning. I don’t like all the machine bangings that seem to fill the air, even in an empty house on an empty street. Daytime is broad. Nighttime is closed.

I don’t mind daylight. I love sunrises. I’ve seen more sunrises than many a soul who goes to sleep at 9pm every night (or some other schedule of sleep, whatever that may be.) On a scale of things though, I do love to sleep after the sun comes up. I do find it easier to sleep in the morning light, rather than during the dark night.

So when I get messed up and want to go to sleep, I just can’t function, and it’s way before I would normally lay down to twiddle my fingers awaiting the closing of my lids, for I can’t force sleep anymore than someone can force rain to come, if it’s not ripe and there about to fall, I just go to bed and fall into dreams or deep cavernous cracks of the earth (so it seems) and slumber fitfully and thrash awake around midnight, or an hour or so later.

For me TIME is elastic. It has no absolute properties. It can generally be said that Elastic Time has these general properties:

  • When having fun or feeling connected to what’s going on, Elastic Time flies.
  • When things are dull, non-interesting, Elastic Time drags.
  • But they are only generalities, and not absolutes for most or every occassion. Time drags when having fun. Time does. It does for me. A glorious stretching out of “time”. Night Owls know this, if they think deeply about it.

    Daytime hours may be many, but nighttime hours are uncompressed and in the webby cocoon of sound, time is spongy and as long as long can be.

    Timed content stretches it’s contraints at night as well. Scientificness may try to prove this wrong, but what is that anyhow, but machinational constraints trying to understand organic from an organic perspective. IMPOSSIBLE! 🙂

    I watch my husband sleep away his life. He rarely sees me asleep.

    Of course he just now asked “is it raining?” a very unusual event, him awake in the middle of the night. Not that it’s important, he’s asleep again already. It is raining, a fact I’ve been aware of for awhile now. It was breezy sounding earlier, then drippy drops came and went, then pitter patter on the panes of glass, and the A/C unit hanging in our bedroom window (anxious to get to cooling again, which isn’t that far away! We never took it out during Autumn, and now it’s proved why, it’s almost time to use it again, time flew from end of Summer to beginning of Spring. 🙂 )

    Now my computer time is telling me it’s 3am on the nose. So I’ve been writing this post for 1/2 an hour, since exact computer time to the minute was 2:29am when I started. Does it seem that long? No. It seems much longer. I’ve spent this time thinking in vast clouds of pictures and ideas and experience long ago taught me that doing that at night is more productive, because at this time, time is uncompressed and thoughts can breathe.

    I’m so glad to have a laptop again, I can think and browse, write and read, in bed. Rest my body and excercise my mind in ways that daytime compresses to the nth degree, so that I can revive my ‘puter mind of writing, mostly, and leave the day to doing what a Mother does.

    I try to figure out what sleep is for my hubby, since he’s the closest example of a sleeper I have. I just don’t get it. I see that there are mostly sleepers out there, so I’m abnormal, but to me I am not, I am normal for me. I don’t see that sleep is much use, it’s useful, sure, but not in such long wasteful chunks of nighttime.

    So it goes then that Time is not just stretched out and uncompressed at nighttime, but it has an organic ability to stretch more or less depending on many things, day or night, and doesn’t always react the way one that has studied it would consider “normal” and it quite volitile if one TRIES to control it.

    I stopped wearing a watch. I used to have a watch. I actually had many watches. They were more fashion than useful, and only truly useful for a handful of events that one by one have dropped out of my life. I have always preferred old time keeping ways, to determine relativity to sunrise and sunset. Sun Dials are cool, but it’s hard to wear one on your wrist, or keep it in a bag, or travel in the car with one.

    I don’t have one in my back yard either. I would if I could, but some people I live with think I’m crazy already, and it’s not worth the fight. I know what time it is when it’s needful. I don’t know to the minute, can often guess within minutes if pressed, but then again not always. TV is the biggest enforcer of TIME that I know of. TIVO is a tool to use to tame time (makes it future time-less day by day.) What a good use of technological gookyness. 🙂

    It goes to the point to say, digital time is useful, but drives me insane to see it flicking away with the change of a number every precise second, some digital devices count minute changes, or smaller particles of digital time. It’s not always visible, in other words, but digital time flickers by so machinally and fleetingly freakily.

    Watches therefore, to me, are only good if they have a dial, and slashed at N, S, E, W. and a minute hand, an hour hand, and :rolleyes: even a sweeping second hand, sometimes it’s useful. In truth I prefer no numbers on the dial. Only those slashes I previously mentioned, or nothing at all, only the dial oriented in some way to show the top and no slashes, maybe just one little dot for North. And that’s that. A simple disc that can show time.

    There’s nothing worse than looking at digital time, being frozen in that second of precision. AHGHHH it hurts to think of such focus. I must tear my mind away, back to truth of how organics live. They live in spite of Time, inside it. Some of us become friends to it, some fight it. Sleeping the night away is fighting it. Not liking digital time is being friends with it. 🙂

    How lovely to say “It’s a quarter to eight” when someone asks for the time. Nowadays most say, “It’s 8:47” if it is, or even if right on the nose at 8:45 they force that sharp focus that only digital numbers can bring. Ugh. Five after the hour. Twenty til, fourty after, all lovely ways of speaking that are friendly to Time. Regions, not pinpoints. High Noon, mid-afternoon. Early morning, late night, bright and early, late, brunch, lunch, dinner.

    OK I’m ready to stop writing. This topic could go on and on, but I’ve used enough of my uncompressed night elastic time to write this for now.

    Just this note to finish with before posting: Time is here in creation, it’s from our creator in a way, but the precision of it is manly documented, no digital time pieces were in Eden, I would think. The Bible talks about numbers here and there in strange terms, like a thousand is compared to one. One there, a thousand here, etc. It’s alien to sleepers, I think, but not to me, not entirely, I mean, I get it, I understand it, I have glimpes of it in my Night Owl self.

    People are supposed to be “early to bed, early to rise” for it makes them “healthy, wealthy, and wise”. I dare say it’s not exactly so for all that are early to bed and early to rise. I’m not dissing y’all sleepers, just saying, it’s not my experience to be a sleeper, it’s confounding, all that sleeping y’all do. 🙂




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