I left the pendulum swinging. It comforts me. One of the few sounds I tolerate while focusing on the interminable work of life. Nature does not tick. At least not in the environs I haunt. Birds and squirrels trill and chatter, dripping water patters on stones, a branch caught in the river oscillates as it gets drawn down and then resurfaces. But the steady, even tick of a 19th century wall clock is hard to match without the engineering peculiar to humans.
It’s a love/hate relationship with me, this obsession with time. On the one hand, the practical side, keeping track of time has been useful for ages. Agricultural time is rough and chunky but planting and harvest moons have made it worthwhile. Economic time keeps people accountable for being when and where they need to be for all the reasons we have for that to occur. – Let me just catch my breath, chew that up completely, swallow, OK, I can go on now. – Political/religious/aka “power” time keeps the bosses in charge. Personal time, well we all know what to do with that! Or we let someone else control it.
On a second hand, there is scientific time, that thing that those who think about such things have sort of not figured out exactly but left in a state of limbo. Is it the same kind of thing as all those other kinds of time or are those other kinds somehow variations of the true time, the real time, the underlying fundamental quintessential this-is-it-for-real time. Poppycock, I say. We made it all up long long ago, before they changed the water, before there was dirt. Since then we have shaped and reshaped it to our purposes so that now they all blend together. It’s all just time.
On a third hand, perhaps nature ticks after all, just mostly in ways hidden from our prying eyes and not always simply: from the infinitesimal oscillations of subatomic particles transitioning between energy levels – for example, the “second”has now been defined as the time interval for a population of cesium atoms at a temperature of nearly absolute zero to absorb 9,192,631,770 cycles of microwave radiation at a wavelength of roughly 1/10 of a nanometer – to the macroscopically large orbital periods of planets, stars and galaxies, often in the billions of years. And right there in the middle, between the immense and the tiny, lies the most important and most obvious to us of nature’s tickings, the human heart. Keeping time in a variable, more human, kind of way, moving faster as we move faster, slower as we calm down, changing with our state of mind. Perhaps this is the truest measure of time we can ever really hope for, perhaps the only one that really matters in the end.