Time Rushing By

It's September 1st.  Wasn't it just the beginning of July?  Or the first day of spring?  Or New Years Day?

So many of us feel that way.  I've read that the older you get, the faster time seems to move.  Someone once compared it to a roll of toilet paper - the closer you get to the end of the roll, the faster the contents of the roll unroll.

Walking recently on the shore of Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York, I came across a sundial in Kershaw Park in the City of Canandaigua.

 It was a cloudy day, and the sun wasn't shining.  Perhaps it was a good day to reflect (no pun intended) on the lesson of the sundial.

Once upon a time, there was no electricity.  We lived according to the sun.  We told time by the sun, too.

Sleep?  It would seem that writings of the past indicate that people would actually sleep in two halves - sleep for a while, wake for an hour or two, and then fall asleep again. 

(Or maybe that is a myth - I am not enough of a historian to know.  But it sounds intriguing.)

In that wakeful hour in the night, I wonder how much thinking took place.  Did people daydream, perhaps letting their minds go fallow for a time?  We do know that monks used that waking period for prayers.  Many others may have, too - or, perhaps, indulged in a type of meditation.

I wonder if the elders of the era before electricity felt like their lives were speeding past, like the hare?  Or was every day like the tortoise, slow and steady?   Did we have time to think, to observe?  Or did everything go rushing by?

Now, our natural cycles are all out of order.  We live unaware, until, one day, we realize how much time has passed, unnoticed.

Perhaps we all need to let our minds unroll and lie farrow every once in a while, as blogger Laura Lee Carter tells us.  

A little less hare, and a lot more tortoise, may be just what we all need.