Time & Time Telling

Back in the day it was analog versus digital. 

So, I began this sentence…This one you’ve just read…then realized it’s way too broad a topic for what’s on my mind to write about it, then again, I can minimize it.

I thought to write about it today because I had a conversation earlier today about time & how high school seniors can’t read analog time telling devices. Well, that was the part of the conversation that I listened to. The part that I shared is how I actually prefer an analog clock to a digital clock. I know, in the back of my mind, that the time is the same on each time telling device; yet, to me, when I look at a digital clock & it’s at 6:51 a.m. & I need to leave at 6:55 a.m., I feel like I’m under the gun to really get going; basically, that I’m going to be late. This isn’t the case for me when using an analog clock & the same time is on its face. Watching the minutes’ hand inch closer to the 11 I’m much more relaxed; I feel I can accomplish much more before I’m due to get going. My stress level is much lower.

This memory has come to mind because of this conversation about high school seniors & their inabilities, yet it would have been throughout my junior high & high school years when I truly felt this way about the analog clock. It’s the type of clock my parents had in their kitchen, right above the fridge, across from where I sat to eat my breakfast, the next-to-last thing I did each morning before heading off to school. The last thing being brushing my teeth.

I would concentrate on that hand moving as I ate each bite of breakfast. Almost as if it were a song preluding the completion of my kitchen time. Back in those day’s things that would ease my anxiety & have me pleased so early in the day would simply include having that one extra minute to more casually brush my teeth, or to know, with greater confidence, that I would be getting outside & to the bus stop not as tardy as I might otherwise be. And I’ve never liked being late.

Once at school analog clocks hung from the upper portions of the hallways, directly above the rows of students’ lockers. The clocks weren’t reliable. They wouldn’t be updated for daylight savings time, or one would be a minute or two off of the next one down the hall, or it would have been stopped completely & abided by the old joke that it told time correctly twice a day. That’s why students wore watches. And teens being the adolescents that they are, when questioned by their peers about what time their watch read, they’d respond, “A hair to a freckle.” Or, “time for you to get your own watch.”

When the “going” of being a grown up “gets rough”, it can sometimes be nice to reflect on a few of these sorts of moments from “back then”. Gentle reminders that, yes, the maturity of adulthood & the ability to tell someone who would dare to say such a thing now what you really think, can really triumph over the responsibilities of adulthood that tend to knock us down more pegs than we’d really like.