[Background sound effects: The group across the that meets for loudspeaker yoga and chanting in the mornings is making tiger screaming noises.]
JF mentioned last night how strange it was for me to be heading off to bed on a day that, for him, was just beginning. And this morning, I’m struck by how Time feels as though it is lagging, lagging when I realize that I’m up and thinking about my new day, and he’s still slowly ending yesterday.
I have written before about it a little, but it is difficult to articulate. When did this strange sensation first occur? Telegraph? Telephone? It’s as though Time is tugging at me from both ends– yesterday lingers and lingers because, even though I was done with it, JF whose being in time I spend a lot of my mental energy with, was just beginning it. Having his coffee. Doing his morning exercise routine.
And today pulls away at me from the other side. It IS my morning, after all. It is MY Thanksgiving Day, all foggy and filled with, now, the sound of OM over the loudspeaker. I’m hearing the nurses-in-training in the hostel splashing water in their bathrooms and talking to one another. Doors opening and feet headed upstairs to the roof terrace and breakfast.
Ah, they’re back to the Tiger Screaming again. And then the all practicing Laughing. This is my morning. The ringing of the temple bells. The Invocation of Peace.
Meanwhile, my friends at home are going over their grocery shopping lists…everything all set? Possibly some pumpkin pies are already cooling on the stove or the back deck. Maybe a last glass of wine, someone asks someone else.
I wonder, thinking about it, whether this could be one of the reasons that people find it so difficult to keep in touch when I’m off on a long trip. This time, with Facebook, it seems easier (damn it for being the tool we need and love and also evil) but could it be that the dim awareness of this Time-disconnect has a kind of unsettling feel to it?
It does to me when I’m not actively LIVING in both places at once. It does when I’m not talking daily on Skype or going back and forth with emails in “your morning, my evening.”
But perhaps that isn’t it exactly. Perhaps we just instinctively and naturally live in the PLACE we’re in, and when somebody leaves that place, they functionally de-materialize. Even when Judy goes down to the beach for a week, I immediately lose track of when she’s supposed to come back. It’s as though she gets all fuzzy, even though she’s in the same time zone.
I think we’ve entered the Time and Space Are The Same Thing discussion. Not truly a philosopher, and hearing the voices upstairs having breakfast and feeling my stomach telling me loudly that I need to be there as well… I will put off THAT rumination. Consider this the beginning of a conversation.