The clock on the dresser said 8 am. I had woken up. I was just about to move myself out of bed (and perhaps even make myself a cup of tea). I was almost at the brink of thinking up some ideas to write on. Maybe even make breakfast.
I was just about to place my present at the right moment in the scale of my life between the blank that came right after I went to bed last night and this morning when I rose out of the foggy depths of sleep.
Time was supposed to pass slowly because it was Sunday.
It was just when I was moving in slow motion through the foggy recesses of my mind as time was taking clear shape after sleep that my eye browsed over the top right hand corner of my laptop screen which I opened rather slowly inkeeping with the slowness of the morning.
A pleasant surprise. My bearings had to be re-set.
Just now wasn’t just now. 8 am wasn’t 8 am.
Just now was really before just now by an hour!
What a treat. Daylight Saving Time ends today.
One more hour during which I could think about moving my legs across the side of the bed to get up. One more hour that I could think of making that tea. One more hour before which I would need to apprehend the right location of my moment, grasp it in a firm grip and place it in the right spot between the past and the future. For the next one hour, the present could have some loose play.
The moment as the present did not really exist.
It will be the same for the rest of the day. Lunch-time will not be lunch-time yet, dusk will not be dusk yet, time to go to bed will not be time to go to bed yet. The quality of light outside, the reaction of our bodies to the day, to hunger, to fatigue will not determine time. It will not remind us to perform a certain act. Eat, take a walk, rest, go to bed.
There will be another chance to act. One more chance to perform. A second chance to prove we can do it. For one more hour.
Time will not be time yet.
Oh the pleasure of deferment, of procrastination without guilt, of pushing back without losing time.
Karma. It does exist. I know that I will have to pay back the hour I gain today with an hour of my disappeared life another time, another day next year. Like Mephistopheles to my Faustus, that day will demand that I pay back the hour I gain now.
“For at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity.” I know.
But for now, my present is like a memory. Time that’s not real. I can live this hour over and over and over again tweaking it any way I want to, for one whole day.
I can live my life in slow motion, savour the moment, live my existence “changed not in kind but in degree,/ The instant made eternity.”
My Robert Browning will triumph over my Andrew Marvell today.
bottledworder 
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