A Time For Every Purpose

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions," wrote Thoreau, "perhaps it is because he marches to a different drum. Let him step to the music he hears."
It seems that the most enslaving thing in the universe is stepping to the march of what goes totally against the grain, when being 'out of step' is too fearful to contemplate. There are people who feel like curling up and dying for making a social gaffe; even people who do not feel complete if they are behind their neighbours in some kind of technology. The common practice is to label everything and everyone so people fear certain labels and cling to others.
It seems, too, that this 'enslavement' has taken us totally out of step to our own music - the real music of the spheres and the seasons and who we really are. We rail against deadlines - how apt an expression is 'deadline'? - and are governed by someone else's time unless we move with the reality of the seasons and the Earth.
Nature knows this far better than we do. The trees don't bemoan the long winter. They shed their leaves and patiently wait for the spring. The tides don't bemoan their ebbing, they patiently wait for the moon to govern their flow. The planets don't rush to be up at dawn or be in bed at a certain hour. They continue on their paths quite naturally.
Animals don't worry about the hour. They don't look at a clock and think, "Yikes!! I need to go to bed; I have to be up in the morning!" or wake in the morning to a nasty ringing sound and have to leap out of bed. They go on following their inner guidance, knowing it is all alright. People have their own peaks and troughs; highs and lows. Some are night owls, some are larks but we forgot how to make allowance for that when we all decided we had to walk in step.
It might seem like a pipe dream to imagine it is possible for a world or a city to function on such terms. But it could! Many years ago I spent time in a convent in Rome. There, there was all kinds of work to be done - from sticking together cardboard boxes, picking grapes in the vineyards and working in the fields, giving lessons in the school rooms etc. etc. - but people followed their instinct; they worked in the cardboard bit, till they felt it was time to move on. Sometimes they dropped everything in order to go and visit a place. It was so 'free' and yet so orderly because everyone was working - without the drudgery that often is equated with work - and everything that needed to be done, was done.
This very famous extract from Ecclesiastes says it all,

To everything there is a season,
a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal ...
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance ...
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to lose and a time to seek;
a time to rend and a time to sow;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.

Time

During the reign of Edward VII, the clocks in Sandringham were set half an hour fast as the king was so exasperated by his wife, Queen Alexandra's lack of punctuality. There are many clocks in this house and they all say different times, which is quite amusing. I wear a watch that stopped two years ago, but I like the look of it and it was too expensive to fix, My car clock is only right for 6 months of the year because I don't know how to move it when the hour goes forwards or backwards...and yet somehow I tend not to be late for things.

Time is such a strangely binding concept, isn't it? Before the advent of clocks and the idea that is was the same time in London as it is in Leeds or Edinburgh or Aberdeen, people were a bit more attuned to their own rhythms. The coming of the railways and the need to know when the train might come changed all of that (bizarre when you think how many times you've been standing on a train platform in the 21st century, wondering whether the timetable bears any resemblance to the time shown on the clock!). It was quite useful, I suppose, being able to make arrangements and so on, but, on the other hand (of the clock) it was nothing more than regimentation. Now, it's decadent to lie in bed after a certain hour, or dissipated to be up after a certain hour. Somehow it entered our psyche that time ruled us. Now we have to get up when the clock rings, chimes, blurts out, or the radio comes on or whatever other means we use on a Monday morning and we are slaves to time.

On a much bigger scale, time is used to enslave us into categories of age. Again, it's even more ridiculous. I know young men of 98, and I know old men of 25. I have seen girls of 80, and old women of 40. To take it even further, there are 'moments' (a time concept) when we step out of time altogether. Sometimes, looking at the sea, with nothing else in sight but the endless ocean, it could be any age, any era, the same steady tides, the same steady motion of the waves.

Tonight, yet again, it is snowing and there is a softness and silence about everything. Closing one's eyes to the buildings that clutter (or enhance?) the city, and seeing only the snow falling steadily, it could be any age - the ice age, eternity...the things we understood before we regimented everything with clocks, before the words 'late' or 'early' had been invented....And, since it's snowing, here's a lovely poem by Edward Thomas, which has nothing to do with time but is very beautiful:

In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying: "Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast!"
And still it fell through that dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.