Time and Spacing Out

So, it seems a clock measures the daily turning of the earth.

Or is it the other way around? If the clock should happen to run slow, we don't say our day was longer, do we? So yes, the real action is the diurnal rotation. The clock is only a pointer, a mechanized sundial, a time tool we have devised to calibrate our days and nights. It's just a quick way to tell us where we are in today's turning of the earth.

The next familiar time tool is the calendar, to show us which today we're living in. Our calendars usually cover a year, or how long it takes the earth to complete one rotation around the sun, from mid winter to mid winter. Big wheels and little wheels.

Over the ages, we've had other time tools. Galileo used a water clock. North American Indians talked about moons and snows. Michael and Kathleen Gear, in their anthropology stories of the people who were here over a thousand years ago, talk about a hand of time, how long for the sun to move the width of your hand held at arm's length.

To know how long it takes for something to happen, we compare it to a standard, a standard motion that we all know about and we can all agree to use, by consensus.

If someone drops off his TV to be repaired, and he asks how long it will take, he wants to know how many turnings of the earth before he can have it back. A toddler might ask, how many big sleeps.