Hours and days and years and ages

Sometimes on Fridays, on my commute home, I'll repeatedly check my dashboard day/time display just to verify that it really is Friday evening. It seems too good to be true.

I love Friday night and Saturday morning because I don't have to care what time it is. If I wake up, I can get up or not, as I choose. If I doze, it doesn't matter; it's not like I'm going to be late somewhere.

When were clocks invented? According to Wikipedia, the first mechanical clocks were made in the early 14th century, which would be the 1300s—is that right? The 1900s were the 20th century, so, yes, the "hundreds" are one less than the "century."

I wondered about the timing (ha, ha) of clock inventions because I want to say my aversion to "clocking in" anywhere is the natural state of humanity, while structured and strict time are an unnatural aberration of the industrial age. For millenia, people woke up and did what they needed to do and went where they needed to go but without precision as to when they got there.

Biblically, timing was by the sun. Each day ended (and the new day began) when the sun went down. Rather than a specific time for sunset, I seem to have read that, for instance, a woman ceased her sewing for the Sabbath when she could no longer discern the difference between certain thread colors.

In the New Testament, there are references to the "3rd hour," the "6th hour," and so on. According to Wikipedia, the Romans had 12 hour days and 12 hour nights, but the length of the hours varied by season. In the winter, daylight hours were shorter and nighttime hours longer, and in the summer the other way around.

Another Wikipedia article fascinatingly says that for ancient Jewish people, it was considered night when the first three stars appeared in the sky. I love that. The third star begins the 1st hour of the night, and like the Romans, Jewish folks had 12 hours each for day and night, again varying in length according to season. Daylight began at dawn, prior to sunrise. The sixth hour of daytime was when the sun was at its zenith.

That's so much more natural than clock time. In the winter, when the mornings are dark, I have such a hard time waking up to get to work by the precise hour required. How much nicer if I could wait until daylight to get up. I would have to get up earlier in the summer, but that's easier. But then in the summer I would spend longer hours at work—but there would be the payoff of shorter hours in the winter.

Office life as it's experienced today—seven or eight (or more) hours of sitting at a desk—is a product of mechanized time. In pre-industrial times, only scribes and scholars, I would guess, sat for long period of time. In monasteries, though, the monks who copied manuscripts probably did not do so for seven or eight hours. Monasteries generally have a balance of time for study, physical labor, and prayer. Desk work does not engulf the whole day.

I guess pre-industrial women sat for long times when they sewed or wove or spun, but if they were doing that as part of the overall task of housekeeping, they too would not have the sedentary work taking up the whole day.

I am very sedentary. I sit at a computer most of the day at work. I sit for meals. I sit in my car. At home, I sit and read or sit some more at my computer. Sometimes I sit to do needle work of one kind or another. Not natural or healthy, but hard to change. This is especially true for these recent years of sorrow as my parents' health declined and then they died. Even mild exercise, like gardening, is hard for me to make myself do because grief and chronic depression have drained my energy. It becomes a cycle: I don't want to move, so I lose conditioning, which makes it harder to move, which further decreases my desire to move, which causes further loss of strength. I should make changes, but it's hard to summon the will. I don't know if even my spirit is willing, but certainly my flesh is weak.

Jesus said that his disciples' flesh was weak, though their spirit was willing, when they fell asleep while he agonized in Gethsemane. I like this prayer that covers us whether we sleep or whether we lie awake: Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep, that awake, we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in His peace.