There is a myth of time, of seasons progressing, of things moving forward.
Take today.
As the leaves are just tinged with turning, the day is balmy. I am walking in summer and looking out on autumn. Back inside there is breeze through wide opened windows and the clunk of black walnuts drumming the roof.
Over the years I have become convinced that toward the end of each season we get a preview of the season to come for a week and then a remembrance of the season we’re just leaving for another and then we bump and glide into the actual time we inhabit. I think we humans do much the same. As we pass from one stage to another we revisit the age we’re leaving and project into the time we are entering.
Time, after all our careful keeping of it and measuring of it, counting it and trying to slow it or speed it up, is really a fluid thing. Not so easily held even in the hands of clocks, it is both inexorably moving and completely still.
I am learning to stay where I am, even when it feels like the movement of clouds on a windy day, the pull of sand at the conversion of tides.