On the Time We Are Told to Keep, the Time We Lose, and the Time We Give Each Other

There are days when, first thing in the morning, you already feel as though you’re running behind time. And then there are days when you discover that all your rushing was completely unnecessary. Things become particularly remarkable when both happen at once.

It was a Sunday morning in October. It was still dark outside, rain was falling, the wind was howling, and I was on my way to Bad Nauheim. I was going to visit my partner, who was staying at a rehabilitation clinic. We had agreed that I would be there at 7:45 a.m.

I hadn’t had much coffee yet, and my brain seemed determined to take its time waking up. The clock in my car was already showing almost eight, and I still had quite a distance to cover. So I was running late. Or so I thought.

Visibility on the motorway was dreadful. Rain, darkness, wind, wet leaves. And suddenly a sign appeared beside me: Ober-Mörlen. Hang on. Ober-Mörlen? Surely I should have taken the Bad Nauheim exit long before that! Indeed I should have. I had driven straight past my exit without even noticing.

Now, as we all know, you cannot simply turn around on a motorway, at least not without coming into conflict with the highway code and possibly your own life expectancy. So I left the motorway at Ober-Mörlen and took the road through the forest to Bad Nauheim. Fortunately, I knew the route. In weather like that, it was reassuring to know at least where I was. The question of when I was there, however, would prove rather more complicated.

By the time I finally reached the rehabilitation clinic, it was already shortly after eight, according to my calculations. I hurried to my partner’s room, opened the door and startled her, as she happened to be standing immediately behind it. She looked at me in surprise and asked, “Do you actually know what time it is?”

A perfectly reasonable question. I thought I did. As it turned out, however, my idea of the time had only a rather loose relationship with reality.

My partner explained that she had something to take care of first. Meanwhile, I slowly began trying to reconstruct what had actually happened.

And then a suspicion dawned on me.

Wasn’t there something about the clocks changing at the end of October? But when exactly? During the night from Saturday to Sunday? Or from Sunday to Monday?

I took out my phone and checked.

Saturday to Sunday.

That very night.

It wasn’t shortly after eight at all. It was only just after seven.

So I wasn’t late. Quite the opposite: I was more than half an hour early. And to achieve this remarkable feat, I had rushed, missed a motorway exit, taken a detour through the forest and, as a finishing touch, frightened my partner.

My car had slept through the clock change. So, apparently, had I.

“When you’re in a hurry, slow down,” goes an old saying occasionally attributed to Buddha, although there is little convincing evidence that he ever said it. I would have done well to remember it. Though the wisdom can be expanded in a rather interesting way: If you’re in an even greater hurry, take a detour. At least I had successfully managed the second part.

It is astonishing, really, how much influence something has over our lives when we measure it constantly but do not necessarily understand it.

An hour is an hour, you might think. Sixty minutes, three thousand six hundred seconds. A perfectly straightforward matter. At least until you start wondering why an hour at the dentist can sometimes feel like half an eternity, while the very same hour spent in enjoyable conversation disappears before you have even noticed that it began.

The clock measures exactly the same thing in both cases. Our experience of it simply refuses to cooperate.

Albert Einstein would probably have enjoyed that observation. Of course, our psychological perception of time is not the same thing as the physical theory of relativity. But the idea that time is rather less straightforward than our wristwatches would have us believe would certainly have been familiar to him.

In fact, I would have liked to have a conversation with Einstein. Not just about physics. The man had a sense of humour, took an interest in social questions and was willing to reflect on the contradictions of human behaviour. I would have told him about my missed motorway exit. He might have explained why my car clock was displaying a perfectly plausible time that nevertheless happened to be wrong. And in the end, we might have found ourselves amused by the fact that human beings, capable of measuring time with such extraordinary precision, are also remarkably good at letting it drive them mad.

Because changing the clocks does not change time. It changes our agreement about what time it is supposed to be.

At some point, somebody decided that we should adjust our clocks twice a year. More precisely, in 1979, the German federal government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt decided to reintroduce daylight saving time from 1980 onwards. The relevant regulation bears the signatures of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Interior Minister Gerhart Baum. Nobody asked me for my opinion, even though I was already eight years old at the time. Instead, I was informed that from then on, the clocks would be adjusted twice a year. And so, to this day, I am allowed to get up an hour earlier in spring, only to have that hour generously returned to me in autumn. As though I had deposited it somewhere for safekeeping.

In autumn, millions of people are then permitted to sleep an hour longer. In theory, at least. Anyone who happens to be awake merely gets the opportunity to watch the same hour appear on the clock for a second time. A little journey through time, without a DeLorean or the required 1.21 gigawatts.

What is truly remarkable is how readily we accept such arrangements. We did not invent time, but we have invented an astonishing number of ways to divide it up. And once we have agreed on a particular division, we tend to treat it as though it were a law of nature.

Take our system of numbering years, for example. We are living in the year AD 2026. That seems so natural to us that we hardly give it a second thought. But what would someone living in 3 BC have said?

“Good morning, it’s the year three before Christ. Only three more years until something important happens!”

Hardly.

After all, that person could not possibly have known that, centuries later, people would date their present retrospectively according to an event that still lay in their future. The Christian system of numbering years did not emerge until the sixth century. And it does not even have a year zero. The year 1 BC is followed immediately by AD 1.

Apparently, humanity was having trouble with its calendar long before it started adjusting its clocks twice a year.

Other cultures still use different calendars today. The Jewish calendar counts a different year from the Islamic calendar, and in Thailand, the Buddhist calendar has already reached the year 2569. None of this makes the Earth rotate any faster or slower. The sun does not rise earlier simply because somebody writes a different number at the top of a calendar page.

We have merely agreed on different points of reference.

The same applies to our months, weeks and holidays. The Earth knows nothing of Mondays. A squirrel couldn’t care less whether it happens to be the first or third Wednesday in November. And a blueberry bush will not suddenly start flowering just because somebody has marked the beginning of spring in red on a calendar.

Nature follows its own rhythms. It needs no calendar pages to know when it is time to prepare for winter. Nor does it care that we turn our clocks back in October, making sunrise and sunset appear an hour earlier according to our clocks.

Many people find the earlier onset of darkness particularly unpleasant. The days are getting shorter anyway, and now the evening seems to begin an hour earlier as well. We have turned back the clock, but the sun continues on its way entirely undisturbed, while we argue about which number ought to appear on the dial.

It is not until December that this development reaches its turning point. On 21 or 22 December, the Northern Hemisphere experiences the winter solstice. The sun reaches its lowest midday position of the year, the day is at its shortest and the night at its longest.

And then something remarkable happens: the days begin to grow longer again.

At first, so little that we barely notice. It remains dark, it remains cold, and winter may not even have reached its harshest phase. Nevertheless, the decisive change has already taken place. The light is returning.

I find that thought comforting every year. Not because I fundamentally dislike winter, but because the winter solstice contains something like a promise. Spring will come again. The trees will produce new leaves. The first flowers will appear, insects will be out and about, and in the garden it will become clear once more what has survived the winter.

The blueberry bush, the gooseberry, the tayberry, the garlic and all the other plants that now appear to be doing absolutely nothing will become part of another gardening year. Some stronger than before, others perhaps not returning at all. That, too, is part of it.

Nature does not promise us an unchanged repetition. It does not even promise that everything will turn out well. But it shows us that stillness and change are not always as easy to distinguish as we might think.

A change does not have to be visible to have already begun.

For many people, that is a lovely thought. Unfortunately, we have the unpleasant habit of turning lovely thoughts into universal rules for living. And before you know it, some self-appointed life coach is explaining to a desperate person that all they need to do is believe firmly enough in the arrival of spring and everything in their life will fall into place. Presumably for a suitable seminar fee.

It is not that simple.

Because darkness is not merely a question of the season for everyone. For people living with depression, the short days and lack of daylight can place an additional burden on them. Light plays a particularly important role in seasonal affective disorder.

While some people associate winter with candles, hot drinks and cosy evenings, others experience these months as oppressive. The days seem barely to have begun before they are already ending. And the prospect of brighter times can feel very far away.

And it is precisely during this season that Christmas arrives. A celebration associated with the return of light, with hope and with togetherness. People gather, sing songs, share meals, exchange gifts and spend time with those who matter to them.

For others, that is exactly what makes Christmas so difficult to bear.

Anyone who feels lonely is often reminded particularly sharply at this time of year of what is missing from their life. Togetherness is staged everywhere. Advertisements show happy families around beautifully decorated tables. On television, people find their way back to one another. At Christmas markets, couples stand with their arms around each other. And anyone sitting alone at home is left wondering why their own life bears so little resemblance to the images constantly being presented to them.

Yet being alone is not the same as being lonely. Some people genuinely enjoy spending Christmas alone. Others sit in the middle of a large family and still feel utterly abandoned.

Christmas is also a difficult celebration because it does not merely place expectations on our behaviour. It almost seems to place expectations on our feelings. We are supposed to be happy. We are supposed to rejoice. We are supposed to enjoy spending time together.

And what if we cannot?

Then, on top of the pain itself, comes the feeling that we are experiencing that pain at the wrong time and in the wrong place. As though we had to justify the fact that our emotional state does not match the official holiday programme.

Popular belief has it that Christmas is the peak season for suicide. The statistics do not support this claim. An international meta-analysis found that suicide risk on Christmas Day is, on average, actually lower than on ordinary days. On New Year’s Day, by contrast, an increased risk has been observed in many countries. The patterns do, however, vary between countries and studies.

That does not mean Christmas is harmless for people experiencing loneliness or depression. It simply means that we must distinguish between individual suffering and statistical patterns. After all, someone in despair does not become any less desperate simply because their despair happens not to contribute to the statistical peak of the year.

Instead of debating whether Christmas ought to be a wonderful occasion for everyone, perhaps we should ask ourselves what we can do to prevent it from becoming an especially painful one for some.

Because hope cannot be prescribed. Neither can joy.

You cannot simply tell someone living with depression that the days will start getting longer after 21 December and expect their darkness to disappear. The human mind does not work like a light switch. And certainly not like a clock that can be adjusted by an hour at the press of a button.

But there is something else we can do.

We can give our time.

Not that hour which the clock change supposedly gives back to us. But real, lived time. A phone call. A conversation. A visit. A willingness to listen without immediately feeling obliged to offer a solution.

It is a particularly valuable kind of gift because it cannot be bought and because we cannot produce an unlimited supply of it.

All of us have only a limited amount of time to live. And yet we spend a remarkable amount of it rushing about, watching the clock, keeping appointments and getting annoyed when other people make demands on our time.

We talk about saving time, losing time, killing time or wasting time. As though it were a commodity that could be stored, traded or reordered whenever supplies ran low.

Yet we cannot recover a single minute that has passed. Not even by turning the clocks back.

When I discovered that Sunday morning that it was only just after seven rather than shortly after eight, I had not gained an extra hour of life. I had merely discovered that I had more time before our appointment than I had thought.

Time itself had continued passing, entirely unimpressed.

And that is precisely what makes our relationship with time so contradictory. We can measure it, but we cannot own it. We can divide it up, but we cannot stop it. We can fill it with appointments until there is not a moment left in which to experience it at all.

Perhaps, then, we should spend less time wondering how to cram as much as possible into a single day, and more time thinking about what the hours we spend actually mean to us.

Sometimes it would be wiser not to go faster, but to slow down. Not to regard every free moment as an opportunity going to waste. Not to see every interruption as lost time.

And above all, not to forget that an hour we give to another person may mean something very different to them than it does to us.

Seen in that light, the Sunday morning turned out to be rather productive after all. I had missed a motorway exit, slept through a clock change and subsequently found myself thinking about Albert Einstein, the history of our calendars, the winter solstice and human loneliness.

Quite a journey for someone who had merely intended to drive to Bad Nauheim.

Douglas Adams would probably have recommended taking a towel along, just in case. He would probably have been right.

We cannot turn back time, even if our clocks occasionally pretend otherwise. We cannot stop it, put it aside for later or extend it indefinitely. But we can decide what to do with it.

And sometimes, a single hour is enough to take a thought a little further.

View all topics