What did I learn from producing a series on time?
It began with the sound of a clock ticking. With tension percolating through my veins, a daily ambient drip of anxiety – worries about not getting stuff done, about being late, missing appointments, disappointing people, running out of time. I had nightmares about trying to get to planes or exams or radio studios on time. Looking back, I can see what should have been obvious from the start: I wasn’t worried about running out of time to check things off my to-do list; I was worried about running out of time literally. The ticking sound in my head was my biological clock, aging.
Stanford medical researchers discovered last year that we age not incrementally but in sudden bursts. That sure fits my experience. Between 61 and 63, my joints began to ache. My skin turned crepey. (Like Judith Viorst, I too feel bad about my neck.) I broke an elbow. Then a wrist. And then, coming to bed in the dark one night, I made a wrong turn in my own upstairs hallway and fell down a long, steep flight of stairs. The concussion that followed took months to heal and in its wake, I realized belatedly that what I had taken to be a random series of unfortunate events was in fact the opening salvo of a new and unfamiliar stage of life.
It took a while for this psychic bomb to detonate. In the meantime, I’d gotten interested in the subject of time, initially from a perspective of social and political criticism. How did clocks come to govern so much of our lives? When did time become money and hours measure wages? Why does the whole world run on Western, artificial time, and are there alternatives? Does the planet – Earth itself – have an innate temporality? Rhythms of nature that two centuries of industrialization trained us to ignore?
More than enough questions for a series, which is how Deep Time began. It took me from prehistoric caves to the edges of the universe, taught me about relativity, quantum entanglement, chronobiology – so many new and wondrous things. But it wasn’t until this week that I realized how much it also shifted my actual experience of time. Not that I’ve managed to slow its passage or anything. (I still feel bad about my neck.) But somehow, the old anxiety about running out of time has faded and softened. I’m less afraid of things coming to an end.
If you read my last newsletter note, you know TTBOOK has been canceled by our parent station, WPR. On September 27, we will literally be out of time. It’s sad, but I think of geologist Marcia Bjornerud walking me through the eons of years it took to form Earth’s crust. I remember cosmologists patiently tracing the 13.5 billion years it took to grow stars and galaxies and planets. With the right perspective, our moment here can seem simultaneously endless and over in the blink of an eye – and there’s comfort to be found in both.
We’re re-airing The Tyranny of Time episode this week – one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy it and that it sparks new ideas for you, as it did for me.
With gratitude always,
– Anne