The arrival of summer comes with changes in schedules and routines — my son is out of school and in a summer program part time and with me and family friends on the off days, we’re eating dinner and staying up later as we try to squeeze in as much outside time as possible, swimming has given way to hiking, and my horseback rides have grown longer as I explore the surrounding country instead of utilizing the arena.  I’ve transitioned from a deep focus on my novel to running my summer class, and, now, as the course wraps up, I’m preparing to switch back to writing. We’re traveling more while the roads are good and while the camping season lasts. 

All of this shifting has me thinking about time, as does my tendency to try to fit as much summer into each day as possible. I find myself in a push-pull between relying on my watch and calendar and wanting to throw both away.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with watches and clocks, and this ambivalence has increased since I switched to a smart watch. 

In ways, it is amazing. With the touch of a button (or rather, an app), I can view my calendar, set an alarm, set a timer, or start a swim workout and follow the lap intervals set for me. I can view data that tells me how I used my time, how productive I was, how many times my heart beat per minute.

If I carefully frame how I interpret all this data, the watch helps me. It verifies that I indeed do a lot. If I close those rings or hit those step goals, I feel satisfied, motivated to continue. Calendar reminders offload the pressure of keeping track of appointments in my head, can ease that vague sense that I should be somewhere doing something by telling me specifically where and what. I feel good when screen time is down and time riding, swimming, hiking, and writing are up. I am proud when my swim app congratulates me for shaving a few seconds off my average one hundred yard freestyle time.

But here’s the problem: my watch, or rather the attention I give it, puts me on time rather than in time. I begin to focus on what comes after this task, how this hour leads into the next, on what I can get done in a fifteen minute quadrant between turning off my activity tracker for yoga and starting a timer to remind me to look away from my computer screen every twenty-five minutes while I work.

When I’m in time, the world feels different. Slower sometimes, but not always. If I leave my watch at home when I ride Scout, I sink into being with her. I notice when we’ve accomplished something meaningful, or I notice that the wild irises have bloomed in a lacy white and purple blanket across the hay meadows. Without my watch and with my phone silenced, I experience my hikes differently. I don’t over-stride trying to get back to the car, I hear meadowlarks and say hello to bursts of yellow wallflower and purple penstemon, remember to breathe, to smell the sweetness of blue-stemmed wheat grass mixing with sage. I can play action figures with my son in the yard and settle into his imagination while feeling the cool grass beneath my fingers, the softness of the earth beneath my feet. I can get lost in writing, move completely into the story.

As a (mostly) functional adult in modern American society, I can’t forgo clocks and calendars all together, but I’ve been wishing I could. I want to be in time, not on time, to be in the flow of it, to get swept up and caught in eddies and turned around before drifting on. Perhaps if I did, I would feel the shifting cycles of the earth differently, would not measure my life in minutes or count the number of summer weekends and lament how few they are and how much I won’t get done before school starts.

Perhaps I could move through the seasons with joy, greeting the wild flowers and birds in spring, the shock of cold river water in the heat of summer, the blaze of aspens in fall, the muffling of snow in winter, and could find peace in the ebb and flow of this great circle. I wonder if I can make this leap while still keeping my commitments to other people, if I can honor both my son’s pick up schedule and the wind on my face as we ride our bikes home. I hope so. I aim to try.