Paying Ready Attention

It was a grey day with non-committal rain. Annoying but not dam filling. Probably the kind of rain that Melbourne is famous for, assuming that Melbourne is actually famous for anything, that is. The kind of rain that needs another setting on the windscreen wipers, somewhere more than off, but less than infrequent. I was going to Queensland, well Brisbane really. Wonderful one day and remarkable the next, or some such claim. I queue at the check in, weighted down by booklets I would end up bringing home unopened. Thirty minutes of inching forward, one bag lift at a time. Boredom sets in. I resort to singing, but this only brings looks of disapproval. Maybe it was the wrong song. I count the seconds between each little step forward, but it follows no pattern I can discern. I consider singing again, just for the human contact. The sparrows in the rafters argue noisily, no one else speaks. People struggle with their elephantine designer luggage having packed lock, stock, barrel and 56inch ...

When you do things regularly you start to use them as markers of time, and when you begin to look closely you see how many different scales of time can be marked. Hours and minutes, days and weeks, months and years. You could use shorter scales or longer ones if you wished, but it doesn’t really matter. All scales have a now and a before, a now and an after. Each tracks time's arrow - the only linear event in a cyclic universe. Each scale ticks over time, and shows something different. The monthly tick of the seasons, the weekly tick of the weather, the daily tick of night and day all measure change in different ways. Even the fortnightly tick (more or less!) of these posts measures something, although I will let you be the judge of what that actually is. (And as irrelevant as it is I think that “fortnightly” is a marker as well - as English as wet summers, traffic jams, polite, silent queues in shops and routine sporting disasters). The Year. A year ago - almost to the day - I f...