Wednesday, July 15, 2009Dis-orientedAs I write it is 4:10 pm in Paris, the day after Bastille Day. The festivities for Bastille Day last from midday on the 13th... and I suspect they'll still be felt for a few days to come.Yesterday we woke up at 6 am in Paris, took the Eurostar to London, flew from London to Toronto, and thence to LA. When we landed, it was about 11 pm here on the Pacific Coast, giving us the rare privilege of a 33 hour Bastille Day. From start to finish, our travels took 29 hours, across 9 time zones and encompassed two taxi rides, two train rides, two sets of customs, and two air flights. The human body is not built for this. In maybe 10 million years, or even 10,000, if we keep doing this to ourselves, maybe it will be easier. Maybe we will evolve a switch that just lets us adapt to time zone changes effortlessly, or with a minimum impact at worse. We are not there yet. I woke this morning musing on the word "disoriented" -- without the east, without direction, without bearings. It's an appropriate word for today. We talked a lot about Time during this trip. When flying over Greenland (on the way out) we realized that clock time has no bearing when you're in an air plane. Roger would ask me what time it was, and the answer became increasingly complicated. Yesterday, in Toronto, we tried to figure out how we should be feeling based on the clock: in Paris it was 5 hours later, in LA it was 3 hours earlier. Where were we in all of this? What does this clock thing mean? And we realized: clock time only means something if two things are happening. First, you have to be on the ground. Clock time is only calculable if you have your feet in one place and the sun is positioned somewhere relative to those feet. The more those feet move east, the later the clock time because you are moving away from the setting sun. Move the feet west, chasing that sunset, and you have an earlier clock time. Simple. Sort of. But the other thing is that clock time only means something between people. It's an agreement. It is useful for, say, meeting people at Starbucks. Or having conference calls with people all over the world. Clock time: good. But if you take away the people and our need to agree on certain schedules, there's really no need for it. We don't need it to tell us we're hungry. We don't need it to tell us when the sun is setting. We don't need it to differentiate the changes between the seasons... and in some ways it makes some of those things more difficult rather than easier. We eat when it's noon whether our bellies are still full from breakfast or not. We keep working regardless of whether the days are short of sun or last until midnight. Without clocks, we could not have our technical, busy society. Clocks obviously enable all this. But when it comes to figuring out where you are, what you're doing, or how you're feeling... they are not fully up to the task. The first thing Roger did upon landing in Munich was buy a watch. The watch got him, literally, grounded. And we used that watch constantly... to give us information about where we thought we should be in our day. We had a surreal breakfast last night around 1:30 am at Carrows. Right now, at 7:26 am, my stomach is growling and I could use a steak, a beer and a good night's sleep. Dis-oriented. But awfully glad to be home. More on that soon... # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 7:09 AM  
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