Wrinkled Time

I feel quite wrinkled at the moment, after a mere twenty-four hours of travel (two more hours to go). The little screen in the back of my seat shows us to be over the Bay of Bengal. What am I doing on the other side of the earth? It seems odd to get here by just sitting, as difficult as that can seem in quarters so tight that I can't put my laptop screen all the way up when the seat in front of me is reclined. With virtually no effort on my part (if you don't count the sudden swirl of errands that renewing my passport required), I'm about to arrive in a place that five hundred years ago was essentially inaccessible from where I live now. How long, I wonder, did it take for St. Francis Xavier to get to this end of the earth from Rome in 1541? [Months, I looked it up when I landed.] And do I have more stuff or less than he brought along?

Time feels a bit wrinkled, too. I prayed Compline on the plane from Philly to London in the middle of the night. But by the time I was settled into the next plane, now on Singapore time, it was time and past for Evening Prayer. Time had bunched up, and folded over.

But I can once again keep time, having managed to replace my watch during the London layover!