by Mary Hrovat
When I was a child, one of my favorite colors in the box of 64 crayons was midnight blue. I thought the deep blue color was beautiful, but I was also drawn to the word midnight. One of my favorite things was to stay up late at night. It seemed to me that something interesting happened to time after everyone else was asleep.
I’ve always been fascinated by the passage of time. When I was a child, it seemed mysterious to me somehow. It’s hard to describe, but let me try. (My earliest memories have been overlain by decades of interpretation and other memories, so I’m feeling my way here.) As best I remember, I felt immersed in a flow of events that varied without accumulating noticeably. Experience added up only very slowly to something larger or more abstract than the moment. It was (it still is) hard for me to hover above the flood of details that surrounded me and see that the flow of time is a river, carrying me to someplace new. Life often surprised (and surprises) me.
It is always now, for everyone. For me, somehow the constant nowness of life dominates my consciousness to the point that I tend to think about things such as how today becomes yesterday. Midnight is when a new day officially begins, but there’s something about the appearance of a new day that the movement of the second hand on a clock can’t capture.
As a consequence of the way I experience time, I’m also fascinated by transitions. I especially enjoy observing nature’s slow gradual changes. As a child, I loved to watch all the signs of evening’s approach: sunset, twilight, street lights and lights in houses coming on. When I was maybe 12 or 13, I drew maps of the neighborhood as I could see it from various rooms in the house, and I noted the times at which various lights were turned on. If I was up late enough, I wrote down the times at which some of the lights were turned off. I couldn’t tell you now why the clock times mattered that much to me.
I’m pretty sure I have a late chronotype. For many years, I followed a fairly normal schedule, going to 8 a.m. classes or getting to work at 8:00 or 9:00. When I began doing freelance editing for a company in India 17 years ago, my deadlines were often late at night (first thing in the morning, in India). This made my day job more difficult. Ultimately, I quit the day job, and my waking hours gradually slid later and later into the night. It’s been two years since I stopped doing that kind of work, but my schedule still skews late. And I still cherish the hours of deepest night, especially if I turn off the computer and leave the online world behind for a while.
∞
A phenomenon called time blindness is associated with ADHD and autism. I’ve seen it described as a feeling that there are only two times, now and not now, and an overall difficulty in dealing with things that are not now until they are almost upon you. Such things include the beginning of classes or work, airplane departure times, the arrival of the bus, and deadlines.
I think the way I typically experience time could probably be considered time blindness, although I wasn’t aware of that term until fairly recently. I wonder if the term was coined by someone who doesn’t experience it. To me it seems that I perceive time differently, or that I focus on different features or aspects of it; I wouldn’t say I don’t see time or even that I don’t understand it. The present is a part of time. (Isn’t the present the thing mindfulness coaches are always telling us to live in?)
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When I was young, being up even until 10:00 or 11:00 was unusual. These hours were relatively unknown territory, thrilling because they felt forbidden. On the rare occasions I was up that late, usually in the summer, I watched as houses went dark, and the colored lanterns on the porch next door were turned off. Traffic on the street outside decreased. Quiet descended, as even my parents went to sleep.
My childhood home was usually full of people and at least one or two dogs—noisy, a little cluttered. I enjoyed the presence of my siblings; the good thing about being an introvert in a large family is that you can feel connected to other people’s lives while watching silently from the sidelines. However, maintaining my equilibrium amid the clatter of a large household was often a challenge for me. In addition, I knew I was something of an oddball, and when people were around, which was almost all of the time, I tried to behave normally, or at least to attract little attention. The silence and solitude of the house late at night allowed me to relax.
I especially loved the rare nights when I was up past midnight. I loved feeling the quiet deepen around me. As I watched the hour hand on the clock creep slowly past the smallest numbers on the clock face, I understood why people say the small hours. If I was up late enough, I could feel at some point that I’d somehow shifted from being up late to being up early. I could never pinpoint exactly when this happened. Having a felt sense of this mysterious experience was very satisfying.
It’s strange that the times on the clock mattered so much to me late at night. Typically the clock seemed to drive things in a way I often found uncomfortable. We had to switch to another subject in school because some arbitrary amount of time had passed. When the TV was on, it imposed a relentless rhythm on the day, breaking it up into 30-minute chunks pierced by commercial breaks.
But at night, the clock was friendlier. It told me where I was in the sea of time, rather than where I was supposed to be physically or what I was supposed to be doing. Moreover, I was curious about how it felt to truly experience time passing, as a phenomenon in and of itself. At night, without the gradual and constant variation in sun angle to orient me, the clock was the only sign of time I had. I couldn’t go outside to see the moon and stars. Even if I could have, I wasn’t very familiar, back then, with the clock that is the night sky.
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When I was young, the small hours were a time to indulge in dreams, wide-awake reveries of places I would see, books I would write, things I would learn. I was also happy to be able to read without interruption. The small hours still have that magic, to some extent. In this liminal, weightless time, I feel increasingly free of the day that has just been and its expectations. Life feels more loosely bounded. It’s one of the best times to read poetry, or to write it, to play at the edges of language. And I still occasionally stay up solely to finish a book. I did that fairly frequently through my 30s. When the Internet became always-on, it became harder to immerse myself in a book, but it still feels so good.
Being alone and unobserved was an important part of this freedom when I was a child. I still feel freer at night, even though I spend most of my time alone. Daytime is when I see other people. Being online, which when I do it right is more or less a daytime thing, also feels like being in the presence of other people; often it feels like being overwhelmed by the outside world. Nighttime is, or at least can be, different.
The feeling of floating at peace through time starts to fade as the hands on the clock move on. At some point, undefined but clearly felt, the sense of the evening starts to slide from just now into something separate, no longer now. Today starts to turn into yesterday, and tomorrow into today. (The language is not equal to this felt sense.) At some point, the small hours become large enough, heavy enough, that time begins rolling downhill to a new day.
I doubt that I was ever up until 3:00 or 4:00 as a child. However, in the days when I was finishing freelance editing assignments at 11:00 or midnight, I needed a buffer afterward, between editing and sleep. (Sometimes I still needed dinner.) I’d stay up as long as I could, to savor the quiet and relative freedom. But I’d begin to feel the pressure of the next day’s assignment at some point, and I’d have to try to sleep, ready or not.
Even today, when I’m no longer doing that kind of work, the world starts to close in around 4:00 in the morning. If I want to have time with other people, or to see daylight, or to go to the grocery store or the library, I need to get to sleep so that I can be awake during at least part of the day.
Although by nature I tend to be dominated by the now, over the years I’ve learned (I’ve been trained) to shape my interactions with time around the not now. I sometimes even dread the demands of the not now, out of fear that I won’t meet them in the right way, or at the right time. I hope there’s a way to get by in the world and to take care of myself without that dread. I’m still figuring out how. Maybe someday I’ll be able to carry some of that freedom and ability to be myself into the bright blessed day, as well as savoring it during the dark sacred night.
∞
With gratitude to Bob Thiele and George David Weiss for those gorgeous images of the two sides of our existence on this planet (in my final sentence), and to Louis Armstrong, who sings them in my mind.
You can see more of my work at MaryHrovat.com.
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