There are only so many April showers and October harvest moons; only so many chances to be with friends and family; only so many seasons to pick a ripe tomato or go sailing on the lake.
Time is our ultimate luxury and our most wasted commodity. We get one chance at each twenty-four hours. The transience of commonplace occurrences is what makes them so precious. In chanoyu we refer to this as ichigo, ichie (one time, one meeting), and no cell, molecule or being is exempt.
Time can be measured in billions of years or a billionth of a second. For so long incomprehensible, these extremes of time are now palpable. We know when the dinosaurs were extinguished and when the universe was formed, give or take a few hundred million years.
We are technologically advanced enough to watch atoms move and can sense the distance from our phone to the geosynchronous satellites that bounce our voice to a friend's ear half way across the globe. We know it takes three days to get to the Moon and eight months to get to Mars, but oddly enough it is hard to know how long it will take to get to O’Hara airport.
Who sets the clock and who keeps the time? There is the notion of a zeitgeber or time giver. The father of biological rhythms, Jurgen Aschoff, first discussed it in 1954. He had been drawn to this idea of outside influences affecting our internal clock by how the sun acts as a compass for migrating birds.
Who are these “time givers”? Well, there is the Sun and the Moon, and more obscurely the internal clocks buried within our DNA. We have cesium clocks to correct the Earth’s erratic rotation and the steady decay of Uranium to map out the past.
In chanoyu there are the sixteen generations of Grand Tea Masters who have set the pace and the rhythm of the tea ceremony. To watch a Grand Tea Master make tea is a revelation. I can only compare it to listening to a Bruckner symphony with the dramatic changes in rhythm and tempo. Of course tea is much more subtle than an hour-long symphony played by one hundred musicians, but to an initiate, no less impressive.
As tea begins, other than for a moment of reflection, it continues to completion. Some movements in tea mimic the actions of an archer, while others are a slow methodical dance. Its steady rhythm waxes and wanes, changing in frequency and amplitude.
Our zeitgebers are our teachers and in turn their teachers were theirs. A continuous stream traversing over four hundred years: unbroken by self-imposed isolation, by the unification of the country, by the opening to the West, by war and then economic development, and maybe, more profoundly, by the discovery of the electron.
Time is also regulated by culture: the iambic pentameter of poetry, the complex beat of ragas, the flickering of film soon to be digitally supplanted. My young life's focus was at 33 1/3 as my parent’s life was governed by the 78’s they danced to. They were our tribal rhythms.
Throughout the centuries our collective attention span has shortened. Watching the reality soap opera The Most Dangerous Catch, I wish the images would steady for more than a few seconds. I grow tried of the hyperactive editing and finally turn the TV off. I like to think that my fifty-five year old clock can keep up, but it refuses.
The zeitgebers of today function in mega- and giga-hertz. We have evolved to think of time in terms of cell tower acquisition and how long it takes to download a favorite web page.
So this fall let us reconsider our relationship with time. Let us realize the fluidity contained within its relentlessness. For me chanoyu offers to reboot my sense of time and return it to, if not primordial, at least a pre-industrial state. I am thankful for this as I spend the last few days in the harbor wishing for the darkness to become light again.
(I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Glonek for the notion of the zeitgeber.)
Volume 5738 (4), 11/21, 2008
