Time and Tide
On Sunday morning (or afternoon), it is time to wind the clock. It may not actually be the time, but it is the day. Time to add more time to the time-measuring device. Time will continue unfettered, of course, but my ability to measure it, to make distinctions about it will diminish somewhat if I don’t wind it. It is a grandfather clock, and I often note the hour or half-hour when it chimes. Sunrise and sunset will prevent too much drift in my sense of time, but the pigeonholes that I use to organize the days might shrink, swell or slant a bit. Softer, more malleable days might arise: a few more moments during the breakfast hour; a few more minutes of night; a more compact afternoon or mid-morning. Maybe time would stretch and compress throughout the day with my changing heart rate, since heartbeats might remind me of clocks: a regular tempo, marked by staccato thumps.
Our clocks might be somewhat more generous and peaceful if they mimicked our breathing instead: a gentle swelling and receding. The term tidal volume refers to the amount of air we cycle through during a normal, resting breath. Our breath is an invisible tide: slow and smooth in comparison to our heartbeat. “Tidal” sounds natural and congruent with the world. The sound of waves on the shore or a loved ones breathing—is there a difference?
Besides, marking the precise point of emergence of a specific second isn’t necessary for most of us. Most of us need to know the time in a wider sense, zoomed out to minutes and hours; pulled back and viewed against the backdrop of other events. The rhythm of things is what’s important—we use time to achieve a kind of synchronization, to be in step with each other. We most often are striving for kairos (timing) more than chronos (time).
It is interesting to note that an instruction in meditation is very frequently given to observe your breath. The long and ancient line of practitioners cannot have arrived at this bias absent-mindedly—they’ve had plenty of time to consider it. So I wonder if one reason for it is that we can (and perhaps unwittingly do) subtly adjust our breathing directly, but not our heart. Other practices make use of this as well, teaching coordination of the breath with movements of the body in yoga, martial arts and sports. We shape the kairos of our breathing according to the demands of our exertions, even as the chronos of our heartbeat pounds away in our chests, unattended. And yet the insistent punctuation of the ticks and tocks of time bring to mind the heart more than the breath.
I don’t begrudge our grandfather clock for its lack of resemblance to the tides. (Besides, its pendulum creates gentle, comforting beats and its chime is warm and low.) It’s not likely that there is a good design for a clock that is modeled more literally after our lungs. And, after all, the swing of a pendulum obeys the same natural law of increase followed by decrease—just along a small, slender arc rather than through the expanding and contracting volume of two irregularly shaped balloons.