Like sands through the hourglass...

I tend to ask for strange things for Christmas, and after a few years of making these strange requests, my husband usually buys them for me and I cherish them. (I know -- from a feminist perspective, I should probably buy them for myself, but because I know that I will cherish them, I like them to come from him.)

In previous years I have asked for and received a bushel basket and a shepherd's hook, for example, both symbolic items that are full of meaning to me.

The strangest item on this year's wish list was a good, old-fashioned hourglass. Not a 30-minute glass, or a stopwatch or anything mechanical that ticks or tocks - a real hourglass. Before he bought it for me, he asked me why? Why did I want an hourglass?

[Pictured: The hourglass Scott gave me showing exactly how much time this blog post took from beginning to end.]

It was difficult to explain.

I have long had a suspicion that I'm living in the wrong century. Not that God made a mistake, of course, but that I am living in 2016 as a sort of compromise between the 1800s, when I might have been born, and the 2100s when my husband might have been born. Maybe we mutually agreed to be born in the latter half of the 20th century. Just a theory, but who knows? It could be true.

Anyway, I am comfortable with an hourglass. It doesn't buzz at me or make any noise. Even holding it close to my ear, I can't hear the sand trickling down. I can look at it and see, without numbers or mathematics of any kind, how much time I have remaining in my task. No calculations necessary, or possible. It is a purely visual way of tracking time.

An hourglass is a useful thing if you need to do something very quiet on a regular basis for one hour, like writing.

A few quotes on HOURS:

Don’t say you don’t have enough time.  You have exactly the same number of HOURS per day that were given to Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. - H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Life’s Little Instruction Book

An HOUR’s industry will do more to produce cheerfulness, suppress evil humors, and retrieve your affairs than a month’s moaning. – Ben Franklin

One of the illusions is that the present HOUR is not the critical, decisive HOUR.  Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. – Emerson

From John Dryden, English writer “Happy the Man”:

Happy the man, and happy he alone

Who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today!

Be fair or foul or rain or shine,

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate,, are mine.

Not heaven itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and

I have had my HOUR. 

RESEARCH NOTES: Hourglasses were not invented until about 150 BC. I would have thought they were older than that! In 1519, the explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, took 18 hourglasses with him as he sailed from Barcelona to circumnavigate the globe. A page would flip the hourglasses every 60 minutes to ensure the accuracy of the captain's logs. The hourglass remains a symbol of time today, most frequently on electronic screens to indicate that the computer is engaged in a time-consuming process.