Time is Adjustable

What is it?

At some point in time, the word ‘it’ became a general placeholder for items that seemed to struggle with their very own meaning. One of my (many) annoying habits as a kid was when people would ask, “What time is it?” I would reply, “What time is what?” Unsure whether I was being imbecilic or insolent, most would patiently specify, “What time is it right now?” Undaunted, I would retort, “What time is what right now?” Red-faced and indignant, they would usually walk away. I would engage similarly infuriating routines upon hearing phrases such as, “It’s nice out,” “Take it easy,” “Is it going to rain?” “It’s about time,” “It’s now or never,” “It is getting dark,” or “Let’s call it a day.” Let’s call what a day? The day? Let’s call the day a day? I thought I was hilarious.

So, ‘it’, in all of its unspecified and cryptic glory, was usually in some way related to the notion of time. As a child, I felt that time’s odd place in our language, as some unexplainable, invisible phenomenon that dictated our priorities and controlled our understanding of life, was confusing. Most people seemed to accept all proposed notions of time as indisputable fact. When I learned about time zones, daylights savings and leap years as a little kid, my eyebrows immediately rose in defiance, and the subjective and arbitrary nature of our perspective on time became immediately appalling to me.

Thanks to my time spent in temple, I knew quite well that the Hebrew calendar was super weird and the year was something like six thousand over in Israel, but they also had a different alphabet and they wrote from left to right, so their weirdness with time kind of made sense. But, people who used the same calendar as me could be living in a different time than me, just because of time zones and stuff? Oh, because the sun was up at different times depending on where on the planet people were, and so therefore the time of day was different. OK, that actually made sense.

But, why was there sometimes a February 29th? And what was all this “Daylight Savings” business? Adding a day to the calendar once every four years and switching the hour twice a year was just something we could do? Well, what time was it actually? What day was it actually?! Wait, there was no actual date or time? Of course not. The notion of time may have been unavoidable, but the specific way we used/referred to its measurements was apparently illusory, manmade and synthetic.

And then, I learned that our calendar, which I assumed had been invented around the same time as time itself, had been designed only 400 years ago. That’s it?! But, what about the exact dates and months and years of all the events that my teachers had been shoving into my brain that took place before that? The wheel was first used in 3500 BC in Iraq, right? Gunpowder was invented in 1000 BC in China, wasn’t it? Alexander the Great was born on July 20th, 256 BC and Julius Caesar died on March 15th, 44 BC, didn’t they? Was Jesus was born on Christmas in year 0? How did they know? It was all so precise! With the time zones and hour changes and leap years constantly shifting calendars, how did anyone know when anything actually happened?

I dug in to try to make sense of all of this, starting with the change in our hours and working my way outward towards the bigger picture. The etymology of the word ‘hour’ actually made quite a bit of sense, as its meaning in 13th century French was ‘one-twelfth of the day’. This was derived from the Greek word hora, yet the Greek astronomers clearly pilfered the idea of dividing the day into twelve sections from the Babylonians. Back then, ‘the day’ was defined as ‘from sunrise to sunset’, but because the amount of daylight changed throughout the year, the length of an ‘hour’ fluctuated depending on the season. So, an hour wasn’t always 60 minutes. Bizarre.

I was shocked to discover that Daylight Savings Time wasn’t even an official thing in Europe until 1916, and wasn’t uniformly established in America until 1966. And it all had to do with wars and oil. I thought it was about farmers? It turned out that during World War I, Germany implemented Daylight Savings in 1916 in an attempt to decrease their artificial light usage, and therefore save money on fuel. Roosevelt instituted the same plan in the U.S. in 1942, right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but once Japan surrendered a few years later, the system was abandoned.

However, some U.S. states and cities randomly decided to keep using it, leading to mass mayhem in the world of train and bus schedules, national broadcasting systems, and people’s circadian rhythms while traveling. Finally, in 1966, Congress put an end to the madness and established the Uniform Time Act, legally sanctioning Daylight Savings again, which pleased the government as it saved the U.S. over $200 million annually in energy and oil costs. The details of the system would shift five more times over the next few decades, implying that absolutely nobody knew what time it really was anywhere in the U.S.

Furthermore, Daylight Savings was used incredibly haphazardly in the continents of Africa and Asia. Nearly each country within these continents had its own interpretations of Daylight Savings’ benefits, uses and practices. Time was adjustable.

And leap years! Odd occurrences that came around once every four years that had 366 days instead of 365. What was up with those? Well, it turned out that Julius Caesar invented the leap year (although it was most likely his personal astronomer Sosigens who really handled the tough stuff) about two thousand years ago, when he instituted his Julian Calendar. He wanted certain annual Roman festivals to occur at the same time every year, and without such an adjustment to the calendar, this would have been impossible.

But about 1,600 years later, it was discovered that it actually took our planet 365.2425 days to make a complete revolution around the sun, and Caesar’s leap year only accounted for 365.25. So close! Because of that irritating 3/400ths of a day (648 seconds), the leap year plan became extremely complicated. Adding an extra day every four years resulted in about three extra days being added every 400 years. This wasn’t OK. In an act of numerological discrimination, it was decided in 1582 that every year ending in double zero that wasn’t divisible by 400 wasn’t allowed to be a leap year, hence fixing the 3/400ths dilemma. This became The Gregorian Calendar, named after Pope Gregory VIII, who was brazen enough to change everyone’s life around in the name of temporal accuracy in 1582.

Oh, so our calendar was essentially the same as what had been used by most of the western world for the previous 2000 years. That put my mind at ease a bit. But what did people use to keep track of their lives prior to that? Egyptians first created a 365-day calendar, with the new year beginning in June, around 2700 BC. Prior to this, Ancient Sumerians understood the year to be split into twelve periods, each containing either 29 or 30 days apiece, totaling 354 days in a year. To balance it out with the realities of the solar year, an extra month of 62 days was added every six years, which must have been rather confusing. However, the oldest known calendar was constructed around 8000 BC in Scotland, and it, like many ancient calendars, was a lunar calendar.

The Julian Calendar became widely popular in the western world, and was a drastic reform of the previously used Roman Calendar, which had been in use since the foundation of the Roman Empire in the 7th Century BC. Countless other calendars had surfaced over the millennia, and there were about 30 distinctly modern calendars in use throughout the world by the 21st century.

But The Gregorian Calendar of 1582 was considered by many to be the closest approximation of the actual length of time it took for our planet to orbit around the Sun (even though the Iranian and Russian calendars were actually more accurate). It wasn’t until Wednesday, September 2, 1752 that America (The Colonies, at the time) finally figured out what day it was, as the following day was officially decreed to be Thursday, September 14, 1752. Everyone just had to deal with the fact that yesterday was September 2, and today is September 14. That must’ve been annoying.

I took this all in. Considering how frequently our perspective on recorded time had altered due to calendar fluctuations, leap year inconsistencies, Daylight Savings alterations and time-zone variations, it didn’t appear that history could possibly be very accurate. Had historians mathematically taken into account all of the various adjustments that had been made to ‘time’ over the years when declaring what day, month and year every historical event had taken place? Even if they had, it seemed like our understanding of ‘when’ events had happened must have involved a lot of guesswork.

So, perhaps it makes sense to refer to time with the porous, amorphous, useless pronoun ‘it’, because this accurately represents time in its paradoxical form of being precisely tangible and abstractly absent at the same…time.