The Beginning of Chapter 27

In certain moods we eat our lives away

In fast successive greed; we must have more

Although that more depletes our little stock

Of time and peace remaining.  We are driven

By endings as by hunger.  We must know

How it comes out, the shape o' the whole, the thread

Whose links are weak or solid, intricate

Or boldly welded in great clumsy loops

Of primitive workmanship.  We feel our way

Along the links and we cannot let go

Of this bright chain of curiosity

Which is become our fetter.  So it drags

Us through our time -- "And then, and then, and then,"

Towards our figured consummation.

And we must have the knife, the dart, the noose,

The last embrace, the golden wedding ring

The trump of battle or the deathbed rasp

Although we know and must know, they're all one,

Finis, The End, the one consummate shock

That ends all shocks and us.  Do we desire

We prancing, cogitating, nervous lives

Movement's cessation or a maw crammed full

Of sweetest certainty, though with that bliss

We cease as in his thrilling bridal dance

The male wasp finds the bliss and swift surcease

Of his small time i' the air.

Excerpt from Possession: A Romance -- novel by A.S. Byatt, 1990

It's About Time, Part 3

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times.  But that is not for them

to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that’s given us.”

The Fellowship of the Ring – novel by J.R.R. Tolkein, 1954

“We make our own lives wherever we are, after all…They are broad or narrow according

to what we put into them, not what we get out.  Life is rich and full here…everywhere…if we

can only learn how to open our whole hearts to its richness and fullness.”

Anne of Avonlea – novel by L.M. Montgomery, 1909

When was the last time you said, “I’d love to [fill in the blank], but I just don’t have enough time!”  My guess is you’ve said it sometime in the last week or two.  It’s a fairly common statement, one that we all fall back on when we have to give our excuse for why we can’t show up somewhere, why we can’t meet with someone, or why we can’t commit to something.  Sadly, we also use it to explain away why we can’t start a healthy habit or work toward something we’ve always dreamed of achieving.  When we say things like, “The day just got away from me!” we are trying to find a way to explain why we didn’t do something we feel we should have.  It’s an excuse.  Time tends to get the blame for why we feel we can’t make a particular choice.  In these cases, we speak in a way that suggests we believe that time is something out of our control; as though, somehow, we’ve just not been given a large enough allotment of time to accomplish what we need to accomplish.  Based on this statement, it would seem that we get the time we get – with no personal input – and hopefully we have enough time to live the life we want to live.  Simple as that.

On the flip side, how many times have you heard someone get upset about things in their lives that happen when they weren’t expecting it?  So often, the uttered phrases are things like, “This was just the wrong time for that to happen” or “The timing wasn’t right”.  In the best situations, we say things like, “This couldn’t have come at a more perfect time!”  Here, we seem to suggest that time is or isn’t cooperating in a way that it should.  There is a right and a wrong when it comes to time and we obviously have the ability to identify that wrong and right.  The timing is off (or on) because we deem it so.  We have control over whether it’s the right or wrong time.  It is possible that when people say these phrases, it’s just their attempt at finding some perspective on what’s going on in their lives.  Labeling something as good or bad timing creates some meaning in whatever’s going on, and more than just about any other need, I believe human beings crave meaning in their lives.  (That’s a blog post for another day. J)  However, I think it’s important to note that people find perspective by attempting to gain control.  Those big problems (or big rewards) fit into the picture we have of our time or they don’t.  So, clearly, we must be able to exercise some level of control over how we spend our time.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t know if something was or wasn’t interfering.

So here’s the dichotomy: on a micro level, we seem to believe we exercise little control over our time; on a macro level, we seem to believe we have much.  I realize I’m being a little broad, but I think you get what I’m driving at.  Apparently we can’t control time until we should be able to.  It’s like time can’t win: either it’s getting the blame for our inability to use it wisely or it’s acting like a petulant child, taking what it wants when it’s convenient rather than kowtowing to our specific orders.  Or if time is behaving properly, it is doing so because we tell it to.

In mythology, the Fates were three sisters who had control over the amount of time a person walked on the earth.  Using a spinning wheel, Clotho spun each person’s life thread.  Lachesis gave each person his or her destiny.  Finally, Atropos was in charge of when each person’s life ended: she cut the thread when it was time for that person to go to the Elysian Fields (hopefully).  The Greeks and Romans created this story for the same reason any group of people creates mythology – to explain that which they cannot explain (often using an even more fantastical explanation than the idea they cannot explain).  Since these ancient peoples felt they couldn’t explain why some people died and others lived, particularly those who went through similar circumstances (war, childbirth, disease, etc.), they found an explanation that fit what they perceived as an arbitrary thing.

Today, we don’t have anything like the Fates.  At least not in the form of three women sitting around a spinning wheel.  However, I do believe that we struggle just as much today with the feeling that life (and what fills it) is a little arbitrary.  As I’ve researched about the calendar, I’ll be honest…at first I thought it was kind of lame.  I had done the reading/research, so I kept up with it, but I didn’t find it terribly life-changing.  Some of the other topics I’ve read about, I’ve immediately seen a deeper connection between the topic and what it means to be human, especially an American human.  The calendar?  Not so much.  But as the weeks have gone on and I’ve thought more and more about time and how we manage it, I’ve been struck at how long it’s taken me to admit something.  Something that I would guess most people would be wary to admit.  Something that is so deeply seated in who we are as human beings (particularly Americans) that it has taken its sweet time hitting the surface.  Here it is:

I don’t have complete control over my life.

Now, if any of my former students are reading this, they are gasping for breath going, “MISS CARSON!  You always talked about choices and about how everyone can always make choices, especially with how they spend their time!”  I don’t deny that fact.  I believe choices are an important puzzle piece to this facet of life with which I’m currently wrestling.  We do have the ability to make choices.  But I would argue that most people have the dichotomy a little mixed up.  I believe that on time’s macro level, we often have much less control than we assume we do and on a micro level we have much more.

Here’s what I mean.

When I think about my twenties, I see major life decisions that I’ve made – moving to California, starting my own business, applying to grad school, giving high school teaching multiple chances to make me a happy worker, and taking a job at a law firm when I had no experience.  I actively chose to do those things and I made those choices realizing that I would have to accept the results.  But I didn’t necessarily have control over the results.  I had no idea that I would hate living in California.  I couldn’t write myself an acceptance or rejection letter to graduate school.  I was not aware that the law firm would close after eight months.  Without my input and without my permission, many of my life choices have led to dead ends, heartache, and “Well…what now?” conversations.  I can start the ball rolling down the hill, but I cannot always steer it down the path that I think is best.  And, let’s be real, sometimes the path I think is best is really fraught with roadblocks and hardship.  But I have no idea if that’s true unless I begin the trip down the hill.

When I look at my day-to-day life, I can also see decisions that I make.  However, I believe that I have much more control over how I spend my time on a daily basis than in how my major life decisions turn out.  I think everyone has that ideal person that they want to be in their heads and they are either filling their time with being that person or filling their time with not being that person.  Let me provide some personal examples.  In the last year, I’ve worked really hard at making the choice to read a book when I have free time rather than jump online or turn on the TV.  Sometimes I’ve been a reading champ…other times, not so much.  I truly enjoy working out and staying healthy, but I still have to decide every day to do something active.  My inclination is to sit around and read a book or take a nap.  When I started my business and knew that I wouldn’t be working until the afternoons, I made the decision that I would still be up at 7am every day, getting going with the day’s tasks.  Some days this is easier than others.  Now, I don’t bring these up to be like, “Look at me!  I’m perfect!”  I bring it up to say that I’ve poignantly realized in the last two years that I have a choice over how my time is spent each day.  Even choosing to write more often has been something I’ve had to actively work on.  I started this blog last January with every intention of writing every week.  Last summer, I fell off the bandwagon and I didn’t write anything between July and December.  But I’m back at it now, re-starting that writing schedule and trying my best to be the person I want to be.  Ultimately, I have a choice about how I spend the majority of my day and any time I say, “I wish I had the time!” I’m just creating an excuse for why I didn’t make a better choice.  Good uses of time don’t populate my day naturally.  I have to actively choose to be a good time-user.

I’ve thought a lot in the last decade about what it means to craft a life.  What is the definition of a life well-lived?  How do I know if I’m living my best life?  What are the pieces that make up a worthwhile existence?  I believe that humans, since we are largely creatures of habit, tend to create a pattern or blueprint for what we see as a fulfilling life.  Sort of an “Oh, I recognize that, so it must be okay and safe” kind of idea.  When people we meet don’t fit that pattern, it’s hard for us to know how to place them in the world.  I’ve struggled with the fact that American society seems to place so high of a premium on the “normal” adult life – find a job you love, find a person you love, find a piece of property you love, have some kids you love, and just love your life.  I can honestly say that I’ve found none of those loves.  So what does that mean?  Is my life not fulfilling?  When I get together with married friends of mine, I often feel like they aren’t sure how to talk to me because I don’t have any of those “normal” talking points on which to build a conversation.  It’s like they can’t level with me because we don’t have similar lives.

But what I’ve come to realize (in the last year in particular) is that it isn’t the macro time decisions that make up a life.  Oh, they help.  They create a framework or a foundation, a skeleton of a life.  But all that stuff that makes a body a body – the muscles, the organs, the skin, the blood vessels – are the parts of life that happen after a watershed moment.  It’s the micro time decisions.  There is more life to be found in how I respond to the results of a huge life-changing decision or occurrence than there is in the actual making of the decision.  If I choose a new path, it’s not the actual path that makes up my life, it’s the daily process of walking on the path that is my life.  When adult life doesn’t meet my – or anyone else’s – expectations, I can be angry that it doesn’t look “right” or I can start the process of acclimating myself to my new surroundings and finding ways to live my best life in those surroundings.  I can sit around waiting to fill the roles that society tells me I must fill in order to be an adult, or I can create an adult life for myself that I’m proud of.  But each of these ideas is a daily choice.  Living a full life happens every day…not just when a baby is born or when vows are spoken or when a mortgage is signed or when the time clock is punched.  I would never say those things aren’t important, but I will say this: people who look to just those big-life events to create a life for themselves may look back on their lives and see empty boxes on a calendar.

I hope one day that I do find a job I love, a person I love, a piece of property I love, and have some kids I love.  But whether my life is filled with those things or not, my life – and my calendar – is full.  Because I make it so.

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I would like to thank the following books for their very informative pages regarding the calendar:

Barbara A. Somervill, The History of the Calendar

Patricia K. Kummer, The Calendar

Peter Patilla, Time

A Brief Pause in Time

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

“One Art” – poem by Elizabeth Bishop, 1979

I am finishing up “Time, Part 3” and the plan is to finish it today or tomorrow.  Two posts in one week.  Unheard of, I know.  J  But right now, I feel compelled to post something I wrote almost two years ago.  I wrote it in the midst of very different life circumstances, but it feels very true to me today, and in the midst of change and upheaval, truth is all we can cling to.  My twenties have brought me many challenges and joys and I have learned from every one of them, but this time in life has taught me one lesson more than any other: very few things will live up to the expectations I’ve created.  And while that may seem like a disaster, it’s not.  So, without further ado…an old piece of writing that takes on new meaning for me.  Maybe it will ring true for some of you, too.

At what age is it too early to talk about the benefit of loss?  Most children don’t sit around pint-sized tables, molding Play-Dough, sharing graham crackers, and waxing poetic about no longer being in diapers and what they’ve learned from potty training.  Most teenagers don’t Facebook post each other, agonizing over saying goodbye to dress-up and imaginary friends while trying to find meaning in how they’ve changed since their dollhouse and toy gun days.  Young humans charge into the thick of life so confident, so sure, and so ready to leave the past behind.  The fear of getting in too deep doesn’t really exist, and this brings with it an excitement to taste life and all it has to offer.  The untainted young sprint toward change because most of those life shifts mean growth, and stronger than any other craving at this age is the desire to “grow up.”  But somewhere along the way, that visceral delight in change and loss transforms into a palpable fear of change and loss.  Suddenly, change isn’t about growth anymore; it’s just a sign that things are starting to get out of control.  When that shift happens, the young-and-slightly-nervous slow down.  Still-young-but-now-suspicious humans move forward more tentatively, guarding those precious parts of themselves they aren’t willing to leave behind or sacrifice.  And in this process of changing from fearless to fearful, instinctive to cerebral, all humans start to try to avoid and rationalize loss.

I know now that the intersection point of fearless and fearful happened for me when I was about nine years old.  My family moved a lot when I was a child, and because of that, I think I was forced to learn how to deal with loss at an early age.  I’ve always prided myself on my ability to keep in touch with people from all areas of my life, and I believe this was my earliest way of rationalizing loss – “If we keep in touch, it will be like we’ve never parted!”  Leaving friends behind was something I could control by writing letters and making phone calls, so while the loss was great, it was manageable.  However, pulling out the map of my past and re-tracing my steps only shows me that as a young girl, I was fooled into believing that all loss was manageable.  Social problems, fights with my parents, and a frustrating lack of dates as I continued my journey through grade school and high school harshly rearranged my ideas about loss, and no amount of emotional alchemy was able to transform what life was teaching me.  So, I dealt with it by not dealing with it at all.  By the time I hit about sixteen, I was a champion loss-avoider, while still believing firmly that I had control over all areas of my life, lost or not.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that the stark truth grew to be unavoidable: I wasn’t as in control as I imagined.  I believe my story is just a version of everyone else’s – it’s almost fodder for a fill-in-the-blank statement.  “I was only _______ years old when ______________________ hurt me so badly that I was no longer able to cope, and for the first time, I realized I wasn’t completely in control of my own life.”  For just about every adult I’ve ever met, what fills those blanks is nowhere near as interesting as what comes after that completed sentence.  The real question is not “What happened to you that made you come face-to-face with loss?” but “What did you do when you realized you couldn’t avoid loss any longer?”  To me, the answer to this question is what gauges whether or not you’ll survive your own life.

After sophomore year, my sprint toward “grown up” slowed to a variety of speeds as I realized I couldn’t always control the losses in my life.  Life has been a walk, a jog, even a “stop because I have to barf,” and as I’ve searched for the speed that is most comfortable, I’ve also struggled with what to do with the things I find myself dropping along the way.  Necessary losses are able to be rationalized away, and the pain from those losses subsides more quickly than not.  But what’s a girl to do when the loss is not only painful but doesn’t seem so imperative?  How is it possible that unnecessary losses can hurt just as badly as necessary ones?  And how do I deal with the loss of an expectation -- when nothing has been lost except for my castle in the sky?  It’s questions like these that, I believe, have crippled me into believing that change and loss are only vehicles for pain.  It’s questions like these that have prevented me from making important decisions, and have sent me into a series of mental gymnastics in an attempt to find meaning in my own losses.

It’s really only been in the last six months that I’ve started to discover how God fits into my weak and human attempts to work through my loss and pain.  While I’ve always had faith that God is Who He says He is, and I’ve always believed that Jesus saved me and sent the Holy Spirit to live in my heart, I can’t say that I’ve always looked to this same Trinity to help me deal with life when I can’t handle it.  The supernatural strength that my Savior imbues in me far supersedes any strength I could ever hope to find inside myself.  And in my attempts to control my own life and its losses, I’ve often been blind to the people that God has sent me to help me cope.  I may never completely understand my own losses, my own pain, my own past.  But I am learning that it is the other loss-avoiding, pain-filled, past-rationalizing human beings who populate my world who are part of the answer to the questions I spend so much of my time contemplating.  God shows me His grace through the grace that the people who love me show me every day.  And it is my privilege to do the same for them.  Is there too early an age to attempt to find some benefits from the losses I’ve suffered?  I don’t think so, because as life continues on – painful or not – I am learning to live a life where I believe that “all things work together for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.”  May my life – suffering and all – be a testament to that fact and a light to those who are looking for answers in their own loss.

It's About Time, Part 2

“You may delay, but time will not.”

Benjamin Franklin

Oh, those Romans.  They really got a whole bunch of things going in this world.  In the case of the calendar, they moved the world down the current path on which we reside.

Last we discussed things, we had a variety of cultures who had all developed their own version of the calendar: the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Asians, and the Mayans.  The Romans, too, had a calendar they followed, and it was a lunar calendar.  This early Roman calendar had only ten months.  Before 700 BC, the year began in March and went through December.  Because of this, the words “September”, “October”, “November”, and “December” mean “seventh”, “eighth”, “ninth”, and “tenth” – a fact that seems rather strange now since those are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months in our modern calendar.  In 700 BC, the king of Rome, a guy named Numa, added two months (January and February) and added fifty-six days to the calendar, splitting those fifty-six days between the two new months.  As if things weren’t confusing enough already, priests would sometimes add or take away days to lengthen or shorten the length of a particular leader’s term of office.  Obviously, even though the Romans had a calendar, it was a pretty arbitrary method of keeping time records.

By the time the first century rolled around, along with all these other inconsistencies, everything time-wise was pretty messed up because the Roman calendar was a lunar calendar.  (Remember, lunar calendars mean that eventually the seasons move backwards through the year.)  Julius Caesar decided that the only way to fix the calendar was to bring in an Egyptian named Sosigenes.  Just as a review, the Egyptians knew that a calendar year was more accurate when it was 365 days long.  They also figured out that a day was twenty-four hours, and they even began doing a leap year.  Obviously, the Egyptians had it going on when it came to the calendar.  Therefore, Sosigenes insisted on a 365 day year.

Because the Romans weren’t currently using a 365 day calendar, pandemonium ensued.  In order to fix the mess, the Romans added twenty-three days to February and sixty-seven days between November and December.  In 45 BC, the year had a total of 445 days; this year became known as “The Year of Confusion.”  Appropriate.  J  The extra time created a huge problem with taxes, farming, and just about every other facet of society.  However, once the confusion was over, the Julian calendar went into effect on January 1, 46 BC and was a success for many, many years.  In fact, the Julian calendar is still the official calendar for the Eastern Orthodox Church (Greek, Russian, Ukrainian churches).

Despite all the work that went into developing it, the Julian calendar eventually began to show signs of wear.  In 710 AD, Bede (what a smarty pants) figured out that the seasons were starting earlier than they had 400 years before.  Some countries and towns used different systems than the Julian calendar, which of course led to a haphazard understanding of days and weeks.  But what really exposed the flaws of the Julian calendar were two factors: leap year and Easter.

Julius Caesar had instituted a leap year into his calendar – an extra day in February every four years.  However, after his death, the Romans sometimes did the extra day every three years instead.  Caesar Augustus tried to fix this in 8 BC by re-ordering and adding days to certain months, but it was still not an iron-clad system.  Then in the early 300s AD, Constantine began searching for a more reliable way to figure out when Easter would be.  The Council of Nicea decided it would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21.  (I know.  Re-read that sentence.  This is actually still how Easter is calculated.)  This seemed to work pretty well, but in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII realized that Easter was happening later and later every year.  At this time, only the Pope could commission calendar reform, so Pope Gregory found two men to begin the Herculean task of working out the kinks.  Aloysius Lilius and Christopher Clavius were hired to figure out how the calendar needed to be reformed to keep the Easter problem from continuing to happen.  These two men were scientists and scholars, and spent a great deal of time calculating and re-calculating days and weeks and months.  Finally, they figured out that the only way the European people could truly develop an accurate calendar was if they made some changes to the way they understood numbers.  Without Arabic numerals, zero as a number, and the decimal point, the calendar was doomed to always be a little off.  (Why, you ask?  It’s because of the leap year problem.  Refer back to the last post and how an actual year is calculated.)  Lilius and Clavius are the ones who decided that the leap year needed to happen without fail every four years, in years divisible by four.  (The one exception is that years which end in two zeros that cannot be divided by 400 are not leap years.  So, 1700, 1800, and 1900 all avoided the leap year rule, even though they technically were the fourth year after the last leap year.)  In order to get his people onto what became known as the Gregorian calendar, the Pope removed ten days from October of 1582.  However, the catch is that only Catholic countries went along with this change.  It wasn’t until 1752 that Great Britain and the United States fell into line with the Gregorian calendar.  In both countries, the 1752 calendar went from September 2 to September 14 and New Year’s Day was moved to January from March.  What’s funny is that people in England rioted when this change happened because they believed their lives would be shorter.

For the most part, the Gregorian calendar has been the standard since the 18^th century.  There are some countries who have been slow to adopt it as their official calendar – and the United States still has no official calendar – but by and large, the Gregorian is where it’s at.  Along the way, some countries have thrown calendar temper tantrums, but they have been few and far between.  One such hissy fit occurred in 1792 in France.  The French government attempted to institute an entirely new calendar, one called “The Calendar of Reason” which was a metric calendar.  This meant twelve months per year, thirty days per month, five days left over at the end of the year for feasting and celebrating, ten day weeks (!), ten hour days, 100 minute hours, and 100 second minutes.  1792 was considered Year 1 and the system stuck around until 1806!  Some countries and ethnicities still keep their own calendar (as we’ve previously discussed), but for the most part, the Gregorian calendar is the old standard.

Having done all this research, I guess what I find to be so interesting is that the calendar is one more thing that we take for granted in this modern world.  Until I researched this blog, I can’t really say that I’ve ever thought about why we follow the calendar we do or why it’s 2013 and not 34 or 23,631.  It’s just something that’s always been.  Even things like leap years haven’t given me pause.  As a child, I can’t remember ever being like, “Um…why are we adding an extra day this year that we didn’t have last year and we won’t have next year?  That makes no sense.”  Like so many things in life, the crossing-out of little day-boxes is something we do quite without thinking.  We assume that some benevolent person has created the order of days with our best interest in mind and so we follow that order with nary a question in our minds as to why it is the way it is.  Time seems to be a pretty rock-solid concept these days.

Or, it did until post-modernism rolled around.  Let me give you a little background.  In 525 AD, Pope John I asked a man named Dionysius Exiguus (a monk and scholar) to do some work with the Easter calendar and write out when Easter would fall through 626 AD.  While he was doing his work, Dionysius changed the way that the years had been numbered since Diocletian’s rule.  Before this time, years weren’t numbered chronologically; rather, they were numbered based on kingly dynasties and periods of rule.  In an attempt to create some continuity with how the years were numbered, Dionysius calculated Jesus’s birthday and then numbered the years leading up to Jesus’s birthday by counting down to 1 and then numbered everything since Jesus’s birthday by counting up from 1.  Everything “Before Christ” was labeled “B.C.”  Everything after Christ’s birth was labeled “A.D.”, meaning “Anno Domini” or “In the year of our Lord.”  We know now that Dionysius miscalculated Jesus’s birthday as Jesus was most likely born somewhere in the ballpark of 4 B.C.  However, this has been the standard way of labeling years for close to 1500 years.

In the last few years, a push has been started by scholars and historians to eliminate the Jesus aspect of labeling years.  They want to change “B.C.” to “B.C.E.” for “Before Common Era” and “C.E.” for “Common Era.”  The last time I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I noticed that some artifact was dated using this system instead of B.C. and A.D.  It’s starting to pop up in textbooks and other historically-minded books, as well.  Clearly, post-modern thinkers are really trying to make it so that something that has been for a long time is no longer the norm.  And more specifically, they are trying to make it so that any reference to Christ and when He came to earth is eliminated from our understanding of time.

But I guess what I love is this: they can’t completely eliminate it.  Unless some person is willing to start over and re-number all the years that have ever been, whether the year is labeled “B.C.” or “B.C.E.”, our year numbering system is still based on the birth of Christ, and any informational book about the calendar will tell you exactly that.  Plus, if someone really wanted to re-number all the years that have ever been, how would they know when or where to start?  There has to be some kind of event or watershed moment that a year-numberer would use to create structure.  That, or there has to be a specific moment when time began, and post-modernists aren’t really willing to go there since that would mean something (or Someone) got the clock ticking.  The way time has been organized is not a relative thing, despite the post-modernists’ attempts to make it so.  Maybe this doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but I find great comfort in knowing that our calendars are organized around the moment when time was forever altered.  And no matter how our years are labeled or how people make changes to the calendar in the future, nothing can change that fact.

That’s all for now.  I do have some more thoughts on this topic, and I'd also really like to pass along some information about the Mayans.  I've been doing some reading about their calendar and how it's connected to their belief system and it's pretty interesting stuff.  I don't think the media or your average American knew why the Mayans thought the world would end in 2012...they were just told the Mayan calendar ended.  So I'd like to educate my readers about that a bit (if I can get through the book).  The amount of free time I enjoy each day has been severely limited as I’ve taken on a long-term substitute position.  However, I am teaching a writing class, and it’s given me a stronger motivation to keep up with my own writing schedule.  Check in again next week!

It's About Time, Part 1

“Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of.”

Benjamin Franklin

"I've got too much (clap, clap) time on my hands / and it's ticking away, ticking away from me."

"Too Much Time on My Hands" -- song by Styx, 1981

Given that it is the beginning of another year, I figured it would be appropriate to write my newest blog post about the development of the calendar.  I put this on my list of topics a while ago when all the public furor began regarding our fiery death as predicted by the Mayans.  Since we dodged that bullet, I figured I would take full advantage of being alive and do some research about how we arrived at the calendar the western world follows.  I can’t say that I knew the majority of what I’ve learned, and I found a lot of interesting tidbits about how the months were named, how leap years came to be, and why this is not 2013 in the eyes of some people.

Beyond those historical and technical elements of the calendar, I think time itself is a fascinating topic.  The language of time is commonplace in English.  Some well-known idioms with regards to time include:

• Better late than never
• Once in a blue moon
• Living on borrowed time
• Have the time of your life
• Time is money

But we also say things like, “I don’t have enough time” or “If I had the time, I would” or “I’ve got all the time in the world.”  Quite often, we use the word "time" in sentences with the verb “have.”  Looking at it from that perspective, time is not just something that is, it’s something we own and control.  We see time as a resource to be used, wasted, or spent in a particular way.  Along with that consideration comes many other implications and pick-apart-able ideas.  J  I think Franklin’s quote above gives a pretty good idea of why we think so much about time – it truly is the stuff life is made of, and how we use our time also is a clear commentary on who we are.  The events, activities, and work that fill all those little boxes of the calendar every year make up the substance of our lives.  And while no one wants to say they’ve used their time poorly, so often, we are guilty of doing just that.

What is it that makes wasting time so easy and using it wisely so much more difficult?  When did the concept of "time management" emerge and why?  Why are we so obsessed with the world’s end and how much time we have left?  How have our lives changed for better or worse because of the development of the calendar?  These are all questions to contemplate as I start by giving you some background on how we keep track of how much time we have each year.  (And maybe start thinking of some of your own – I love new questions I’ve never thought of!)

The Basic Set-Up of the Calendar

There are three types of calendars in the world: lunar, solar, and lunisolar.  Lunar years – years based on the cycles of the moon – have 354 days, and solar years – those based on the sun – have 365 days.  The majority of the world uses what is known as the Gregorian calendar and it is a solar calendar.  Despite the fact that we follow a solar calendar, we don’t follow the definition of a solar year to a T.  We actually use something called “tropical years”: 365.24219 days equal one year.  The fact that each year is 365.25 days long is why we do a leap year every four years.  Let me show you what I mean in math language.

[.25 of a day + .25 of a day + .25 of a day + .25 of a day = 1 whole day]

The long process of developing this precise number will be discussed throughout this series of blog posts.  So, we continue on.  J   Islamic cultures use a lunar calendar.  Because the lunar calendar falls short eleven days every year (and twelve days in leap years), lunar calendars eventually end up moving backwards through the seasons.  (I know that sounds weird, but think about it for a moment: over time, eleven days can add up.)  Lunisolar calendars are based on…can you guess?...the sun and the moon.  The major contributor to a lunisolar calendar is the moon and its cycles, but every two or three years, cultures who use the lunisolar calendar add a month, thus giving a nod to the solar calendar.  The Chinese and Hebrew calendars are lunisolar.  (If this seems like a lot of calendars to keep straight, just wait until you read the next sentence.)  In all, there are approximately forty different types of calendars in use today all over the world.

Now, if you’re anything like I am, you may be saying this to yourself: “Besides those mildly entertaining placemats at my favorite Chinese restaurant that tell me it’s the Year of the Dog or the Year of the Dragon or whatever, I didn’t know that different cultures still used different calendars.”  I was really surprised to learn that even though the Gregorian calendar is used world-wide for business and major world holidays, the Muslims, Jews, and Chinese still follow their own yearly calendars.  Some people still follow the precursor of the Gregorian calendar, the Julian calendar.  What this means is that depending on which calendar you’re looking at, January 3 might not be January 3 and 2013 might not be 2013.  Check out this chart I found in one of my books:

Which calendar?	What year?	Based on what?	When is 2005’s New Year’s Day on this calendar?
Gregorian	2005	Birth of Christ	January 1, 2005
Julian	2005	Birth of Christ	January 14, 2005
Islamic	1426	Flight of Muhammad	February 10, 2005
Chinese	4703	Legend	February 9, 2005
Hebrew	5766	Year of creation	October 4, 2005

Maybe now you’re wondering where all these calendars came from and how they were developed.  Well, shucks…I’m so glad you asked.

Early “Calendars”

Before people chose whether they wanted gamboling puppies or Maxim pinups gracing their monthly collection of numbered boxes, they simply ordered their days based on their observations of the sun, moon, and stars.  These celestial bodies all follow clear patterns.  The sun rises in a new place every day over a period of a year; the moon waxes and wanes every thirty days (give or take); and there are certain stars that show up on the horizon pre-sunrise or post-sunset at particular times of the year.  All of these patterns are a direct result of the Earth spinning on its axis.  (Just as a quick review, the Earth spinning once on its axis is the equivalent of a day, and the Earth traveling once around the sun is the equivalent of a year.)  Paying attention to these natural repetitions in the sky – as well as the yearly progression of seasons – helped early people figure out the best times to plant and reap crops.  Once people realized that the same thing happened every year, they tried to create a tangible record of the progression of days.  Archaeologists have found evidence of many types of early calendars:  carved animal bones, stones arranged in a particular pattern, clay tablets full of markings, and records of flood patterns.

How Early Civilizations Dealt with the Calendar Issue

The Sumerians were the first to create a calendar over 5000 years ago.  They divided the year into days and the days into hours and they were able to do this by using the moon and its cycles.  One year was the equivalent of twelve lunar months of thirty days apiece.  (Using your quick math skills, you can see that they only accounted for 360 days.)  The Sumerians knew there was an error somewhere because they recorded that the seasons were happening later and later with each passing year.

According to my research, the Sumerians are considered an older civilization than the Egyptians, but not by much.  In approximately 4000 BC, the Egyptians contributed to the development of the calendar by creating a 365 day year.  However, they based the calendar on the seasons and the flooding of the Nile rather than the moon.  Their calendar had twelve thirty-day months and they spent the last five days of the year feasting and celebrating.

By 2000 BC, the Babylonians had improved on the Sumerian calendar by making each month twenty-nine or thirty days and then throwing in another thirty-day month every three years to compensate for the lost days.  This calendar continued for fifteen centuries!

The peoples of Asia dealt with lost days in a similar manner.  By 1000 BC, the Hindu calendar had twelve months and 360 days with an added leap month every five years.

Finally, on another continent altogether, between the years of 2000 BC and 1500 AD, those pesky Mayans went a direction that no one else did.  Their year had eighteen months with twenty days each.  This still left an extra five days, but the Mayans believed they were full of evil omens.  I’m not exactly sure what that means or how the Mayans dealt with the evil omens.  Obviously, they were a people who assumed the worst about things like extra days and calendars in general.

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As you might have guessed, it was the Romans who really got things rolling in terms of a specific and empire-wide calendar.  When you can find the time, come on back to hear the continued story of the calendar.  There will be more to chew on next week!