The clocks go back tonight after midnight. British Summer Time ends. Everyone gains an hour, though tomorrow may also feel strange, as if time were just a little out of joint. The sensation is akin to jet lag and highlights how people are not like clocks. We don’t keep time, we experience it.
An atomic clock, for instance, is so steady that, in a way, it keeps time better than the rising and setting Sun. But we, who experience time, know something else. Time can move fast and go slow. Time can cause anxiety: “I wasted time and now doth time waste me,” says Richard II in Shakespeare’s play. But time can also work wonders, it can heal, it can reveal the true nature of things. “Time will tell.”
Time is dynamic and one of the best explorations of that I know is Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. The great Italian poet travels down the infamous circles of hell, then up the mountain of purgatory, and finally into the bright heavens. And he notices that the experience of time is a defining feature of each of the domains.
Hellish time is marked by either a preoccupation with the past or a terror of the future, which means that experientially, there is no present moment. The lack of a now increases people’s torment because it keeps them stuck. Only in the present moment can people change – a truth that is clear when working in psychotherapy. One definition of psychological suffering is to have the past on repeat, especially a traumatic past, or to be frozen by an ever-threatening future.
Hellish time can grip a society, too, when the culture is captured by past errors or rehearsals of future fears.
Dante finds people becoming unstuck in purgatory, when the present moment returns. People can use the time they have and that brings the chance to change. They can reflect, and find a way through difficulties.
This is time that offers space. With it, people and societies can draw on the fresh energy that the present moment brings. Time becomes a blessing.
In paradise, the experience of time changes again. Here, Dante finds that past, present and future are appreciated as a whole. He feels every moment as the unveiling of eternity. Paradisal time is therefore a kind of freedom; it brings revelations and the sense is of everything being born of divine abundance.
So: the clocks go back. Time, to us, will wobble – a good moment to reflect on the experience of time. Does it feel like a trap or a chance, like a threat or a gift? A time to recall the expansive moment known as now.