I attended a meeting yesterday of a group that has been meeting for some time, but to which I was a newcomer. There was one person at the meeting who I have known for some time. She was the one who invited me to participate. The others were people I was meeting for the first time. We met for an hour and a half in a room with flexible seating. For our meeting the chairs were arranged in a circle. There was a clock on the wall that was in easy sight for some of the members of the group. It was behind me, however, and so I didn’t look at it. I had no responsibility to keep time during the meeting. I had consulted my watch to choose what time to leave home, had made an accurate guess of how long it would take to get to the meeting through city traffic, and had arrived at the venue a few minutes early which allowed me to inquire about the specific location of the meeting room within the building and arrive before the meeting began. Our time was quite interesting to me. I was challenged by some of the ideas that were being shared and listened intently to the others as they spoke. I participated by sharing some of my ideas as well.

In the afternoon, having returned home after the meeting, I went for a walk around our neighborhood and as i was walking I was reflecting on the meeting. For me the hour and a half went by quickly. I wasn’t feeling any pressure. I didn’t have any other appointments in the day. I could have lingered another hour if needed. But I also wan’t responsible for keeping time. When I teach a class or lead a group I am constantly consulting my watch or a clock to make sure that the group is stying on task and we complete our work while respecting the time of the participants. In our meeting yesterday the group leader was constantly referring to the clock on the wall and also to her phone which displays a clock. She referred to both several times during the meeting at one point questioning the accuracy of the clock on the wall and later commenting that it seemed to be keeping time quite well. While time wasn’t the main focus of the meeting, there were several timed activities. We engaged in directed work for ten minute blocks and then resumed plenary action after those blocks.

Sitting with my back to the clock and feeling no need to consult my watch during the meeting, I suspect that my perception of time was a bit different from the group leader. I didn’t care if the meeting ended on time. How different that experience was from some of my school days when I was much younger. In our elementary school there were clocks at the front of each classroom. It was the opposite of yesterday’s meeting. The students all faced the clock and could easily read it. The teacher sat with their back to the clock and had to turn around to consult it. In our school the clocks were mechanical with second hands that swept at a steady pace. The minute hands, however, advanced with a jerk as the second hand reached 12. In addition the clocks had a feature that synchronized all of the clocks in the school. At the top of each hour an individual classroom clock might skip one or two minutes to start the new hour in sync with the other clocks in the school. The feature could also make the clock say at one minute before the hour for more than a minute if it had been running fast.

There were many days when I obsessed over those clocks, paying attention to little else. I tried to will the time to pass more quickly, eager to have the classroom time end so I could get outside and play. Sometimes it seemed as if time itself slowed at five minutes to the time to get out of school for the day.

I am fascinated by the perception of time. I know that it changes as we age. I’ve often used the example of the passage of time in relation to a person’s lifespan. Two of our grandsons share the same birthday in early February. The younger one will turn three. For him, the next birthday will be 1/3 of his lifetime away. The older one will turn 14, so his next birthday is a much small fraction, only 1/14 of his lifetime away. And for me the time between my next birthday and the following one will be only 1/72 of a lifetime, an extremely small fraction compared to the children.

The perception of time, however, is much more complex than just that. I’m pretty sure that our youngest grandson doesn’t process time in a linear fashion, at least not the way I think of time. If I announce that when we finish dinner we will clear the dishes and I will clean up in the kitchen, then we will play a game, and after the game we will read a story, and then after the story we can have some ice cream for dessert, his mind will go directly to the ice cream. He will come into the kitchen while I’m washing dishes, grab my leg and pull me toward the freezer reminding me that I promised ice cream. He will interrupt the game to ask for ice cream. He will want to skip the story, even if it is one he has had me read over and over at some times to campaign for ice cream now. I saw a linear progression of several events. He focused on ice cream. For me the time between dinner and desert passed quickly. For him, it seemed to pass more slowly.

Consider how our perception of time changes with perspective. I remember some nights when we had an infant in our home and I was awake in the middle of the night trying to soothe a fussy baby. Sometimes it seemed like it took forever to get the child back to sleep. Now, decades later, it seems like the time of infants in our house went by so quickly. It was just a flash and then it was over.

Our natural timepiece, our heartbeat varies with age. We use that rhythm to affect our sense of the passage of time. Human heart rate tends to reach its peak speed months after birth and then slowly declines as we age. My heart beats slower than that of my ice cream obsessed grandson. He has to wait more heartbeats than I to get to dessert.

I certainly don’t fully understand the passage of time. It leaves me with the question of the song by Chicago that was recorded in 1969: “Does Anybody Really Know What Time it is?”