Somewhere over the Aleutian Islands (where my Bumpy was stationed on his way home from the South Pacific during WWII) in the Northern Pacific Ocean, I flew into the future (flux capacitor not even necessary!)
When I left Detroit, Michigan in the US it was the afternoon of Monday, January 9th 2012. January 9th 2012, as observed by 99.99% of humanity was a normal day, just like any other day. There is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about January 9th, or January 10th for that matter. Social constructs on the rising and setting of the sun and Earth’s revolution that help us delineate our time into more manageable and understandable bite-sized pieces.
I boarded my plane and settled in to my Economy Class seat on a Delta 767 bound for Narita International Airport in Tokyo, Japan. Curling up with my Kindle, Spotify and noise cancelling ear buds I prepared for my 13+ hour flight across oceans and continents.
Happily devouring a few books, some pretty tasty in flight meals, and eventually donning my sleep mask and iPod Sleep Machine app to sleep for a few hours.
Note : If you have an iPhone or iPod go download the Sleep Machine app right now. A combination of ambient and white noises and complete with a timer and gentle alarm sound to wake you up, paired with noise cancelling ear buds it is my MUST HAVE for disruptive sleep spaces. Try out the free Lite version to see what I mean and then spring for the $1.99 app.
When I woke up and stretched in my seat, I glanced around and realized I had missed Delta’s in-flight breakfast. I glanced at my watch to see what time it was and was monumentally confused. Perhaps maybe a little groggy after my too-restful airplane nap of about 6 hours.
My watch said it was 2:30 PM on Tuesday, January 10th. But the flight crew was serving breakfast?
Then I remembered. I had set all my time pieces to Tokyo time when I boarded the plane so that I would I would acclimate to the new zone shift faster. A pretty standard pro-travel tip (though a good one to use nonetheless).
I was then hit with a pang of a little sadness.
That meant that I had lost 10 hours from my life.
The International Date Line, which runs (kind of) along the 180 Latitude line in the middle of the Pacific Ocean separates midnight from midnight, and January 9th from January 10th in my case. Between reading Price and Prejudice (for the 9 zillionth time) and settling in for my nap, an ominous cloud swept through our plane as it swiftly flew through much less devious white puffy clouds bound for the West.
Except now it was bound for the East.
The ominous cloud swept through and sucked 10 hours from each of our helpless bodies, strapped in to seat belts and squished into a cargo space 30,000 feet in the sky. It was as if I had stumbled in to some 1960’s science fiction movie about the horrors of flight in the future or at least a very twisted episode of The Twilight Zone.
People keep telling me “Oh don’t worry, you’ll get those 10 hours when you fly back home.”
Except the thing is you don’t get time back.
Once you have lost time, it is gone. It’s like your virginity. You don’t just get that back by moving to a new zip code.
Time is a concept, a measurement that we impose with a stated definition and an arbitrary metric based on our observations about things like stars and moons.
Essentially, someone could make up an entirely new time metric based on a box of Lucky Charms marshmallows if they really wanted.
Even knowing this, the pang still lingered in my mind.
I wondered where I was exactly and what I was doing when the ominous cloud of Lost Time hit me. Was I reading? Was I writing in my new grid-lined notebook? Was I eating a delicious but completely not-good-for-you Oreo cookie brownie? Was I sleeping? Was I playing Angry Birds?
It is so easy to lose time. To fall down the rabbit hole of Reddit or zone out watching a television program you barely care about. My first week here I lost a ridiculous amount of time sleeping practically 15 hours every day (split up into a few naps and some willed unconsciousness while battling through a stomach bug).
I’ve only been swimming in our gorgeous pool once. I’m just now going exploring beyond the 2 streets I’m already intimately acquainted with. I’ve barely finished a book or gotten any “for fun” writing done. I haven’t even attempted to crack the cloud files for my upcoming projects.
Taking it easy and finding time to goof off or relax are vital in our lives. That is one of the few universal truths in life. (Yes, I’ll say it, there are a few universal truths) I cannot, in the history of my existence, think of any one person who does not take at least five minutes a day to not be doing anything “productive”.
That being said, lost time can over-take us, with its ominous cloud nature. Before we know it, we are caught in a fog wondering why we are mindlessly munching on apple-smoked sausage links and sipping Tropicana at 2:30 in the afternoon.
All we can do at that point, once we have lost time, is take a deep breath and set forth to be more careful and intentional with our time. We’ll slip up occasionally. This usually manifests itself as a browser opened to Facebook or Twitter. But time is something to be cherished, we only get so much of it.
My time was taken from me. Lost somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
Where did you lose yours?
Wait until you fly from the US to like Australia. You can leave on a Thursday and arrive on Saturday, and then you wonder…where did Friday go? At least flying to Narita you get there the “next” day.
But yes, time is so precious, we need to make sure we know when and where we are using it 🙂
Haha, that’ll be a trip losing a whole day! I kept going past Narita straight to Singapore then Bali so in total I was traveling for over 40 hours and FEEL like I lost Tuesday. It was spent in flight or at an airport. 🙂
Time IS very precious, and it is one of our few resources that we have a great deal of control over. We get to choose (mostly) how to spend it, so as the saying goes “Choose Wisely”
I recall the strangeness of time zone shifts while flying internationally and feeling like I’m not tied down andsuddenly time has become arbitrary (a precursor to insanity, I hear).
You are a wise woman to value time so highly. It is very precious, as Anwar says.
Haha, I’m like a living precursor to insanity I think! It is really crazy when you try to wrap your mind around time in things like flight and time zone shifts. But I think that the real mental block is overcoming the universally accepted definition and concept of time. When in reality it is much more fluid than we think. As Einstein would say, it is relative.
Maybe those sci-fi geeks are on to something. Aw, who am I kidding. I’m totally one of those sci-fi geeks!