The faster you travel, the slower the clock ticks. Perhaps that's why I'm having a hard time believing it's not only November, but deeply November. Surely it's just the beginning of October?
I've been running at the edge of the speed of light since before this semester began, packing into three and a half months what would have taken me three and a half years to travel in centuries past. I feel a bit like a particle in a synchrotron, rushed around in circles until I reach a critical velocity and come shooting out a beam port.
I may finally have been spit out of the subatomic particle's equivalent of a hamster wheel. There is at least an even chance that tomorrow I will get my laundry entirely folded and put away for the first time in six weeks. Or I could sleep....
Photo is from the DOE.
I haven't gone anywhere, but I feel the same way!!!
ReplyDeleteClearly, I am not sleeping either...
Fran,
ReplyDeleteThere are more ways to travel than through space and you've been doing more than your share of moving around....
Sleep is a grace...I'll have to find the little prayer book that I have with the sleep prayer in it!
Sleep!
ReplyDeletethese nights that stretch into the morning hours help me to get more rest on weekends. Actually slept past 8 on Saturday which is out of the norm for me.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I so LOVE about your writing, is that even though you are a scientist, you are so open to the metaphor as well!!
ReplyDeleteSpeed is certainly a scientific quantifiable thing ... but the recognition of it as the metaphor for the feeling tone and experience of life seems, to me, to bring so much MORE to science.
I think this is where the temporal and divine cross. Your experiences with travel and accomplishment really do illustrate a kind of time travel that science gives us the basis for.
I'm shaking my head with such a deep understanding of just how exhausting this traveling faster than light can be!! I have been there too! :)
(and funnily enough my captcha word on this post is syche -- which I thought quite apt)