Losing Time

Daylight Savings ends this weekend, and while I may be sleepy for a week in the face of early darkness, I will adjust.  Every year it strikes me odd that folks talk about "losing" and "gaining" time when we change our clocks.  So far as I know, we won't be adjusting the rotation of the Earth or the position of Earth with respect to the Sun.  Time will still be what it was: we have only changed our naming of it.

There are ways of "losing time," to be sure, that may make me unhappy: standing on line for a grocery clerk or sitting in an overbooked doctor's office; listening to a presenter read what is projected on a screen; working in a boring or detestable job; waiting for medical test results, anticipating bad news that might come.

But there's also at least one way of "losing time" that I love: what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi calls "flow," the sense of complete absorption and loss of self when engaged in an activity that fully occupies a person, in an activity one loves.  Over my lifetime, different activies have resulted in flow: play-pretend, geometry, tennis, music, writing, reading, acting.  Now, I need only take my camera outside and walk -- somewhere familiar or unfamiliar -- and shoot.  Today, for example, I spent half an hour with this female Autumn Meadowhawk.



While others may complain on the weekend about the time change, I won't because I love losing/gaining time by making it flow.