On Borrowed Time

Here is something that should bother us more than it probably does: in September of 1752, eleven days ceased to exist. The British government switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, the math required a correction, and so September 2nd was simply followed by September 14th. People rioted in the streets. They wanted their days back. They did not get them.

The Julian calendar itself had been built by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, constructed on a foundation of Egyptian astronomical knowledge, which drew in turn from Babylonian science. The Catholic Church commissioned the Gregorian reform in 1582, and Catholic nations — Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland — fell into line relatively quickly. Protestant countries resisted for over a century, partly out of sheer theological stubbornness. They were not taking calendar orders from Rome.

But here is where the story gets sharper. Once Britain finally switched, it imposed the Gregorian calendar across its entire empire. Indigenous peoples in India, Africa, and the Americas — who had developed their own sophisticated, precise timekeeping systems rooted in lunar cycles, agricultural seasons, and ceremonial life — had those systems systematically overridden by colonial administration. Not because their calendars were less accurate. The Mayan Long Count calendar, for instance, is extraordinarily precise — more so in some respects than the Gregorian system. They were overridden because coordinating taxation, extraction, and legal control required everyone to be on the colonizer’s clock.

This is the pattern that runs through the entire history of institutionalized time. Once you establish whose clock is authoritative, you can run everything else through it. Labor. Bodies. Land. Resistance itself can be scheduled out of existence if you control the calendar.

We have been deferring to other people’s clocks ever since. Most of us never stopped to ask why.

Before the Clock, There Was the Moon

Long before anyone invented the minute hand, humans were already marking time. Not because they had to punch in, but because the world around them kept moving in ways that mattered. The moon swelled and shrank. Animals migrated. Bodies bled in rhythm with something larger than themselves. Seeds knew when to drop without a reminder notification.

Ancient peoples understood time as relational. The Lakota tracked the “Moon of the Popping Trees” in what we call January — a name that tells you something about listening to the world rather than managing it. The Babylonians mapped lunar cycles with terrifying precision, not to optimize productivity but to understand divine will. The Celtic peoples organized entire spiritual calendars around solstices and cross-quarter days, marking time as a conversation with the living world rather than a grid to be filled.

These systems weren’t about efficiency. They were about meaning. About knowing when to plant, when to mourn, when to celebrate, when to rest. Time was a container for ritual. The idea that it was also a resource to be extracted, measured, and monetized would have been genuinely incomprehensible to most humans who have ever lived.

And then the Industrial Revolution happened, and incomprehensible became mandatory.

Your Dog Is Not Impressed

Here is a gentler way into the same truth: your dog has no idea you’re on vacation.

When you walk out the door, your dog experiences absence. Presence, then not-presence. There is no anticipatory resignation, no counting of days, no existential dread about whether you are ever coming back. There is missing, and then there is return, and the reunion is enormous precisely because no clock mediated it. No countdown. No projection. Just the raw animal experience of now, and then now again.

Most non-human animals operate in what ethologists call the extended present. They have memory — sometimes remarkable memory — and they have anticipation rooted in pattern and instinct. But they don’t appear to schedule, project, or catastrophize about future time the way humans do. A crow remembers where it buried its food. An elephant grieves at the bones of its dead. Neither is lying awake at 2am running worst-case scenarios about next quarter.

We built the clock. We built the anxiety with it. The two are not unrelated.

The question worth sitting with is this: what did we lose when we traded cyclical, relational, embodied time for the tyranny of the uniform minute? What knowing went quiet when we stopped listening to the moon and started watching the clock?

Power Time: Who Owns the Clock

Time, as it has been institutionalized in Western culture, is not neutral. It carries a history — of control, extraction, and dominance — that most of us absorbed so early we mistook it for nature.

The standardization of clock time in the 19th century was driven by industrial capitalism and, critically, the railroad. Before railroads, every town kept its own local solar time. Boston and New York operated on different clocks. This was fine, until trains needed to run on coordinated schedules across vast distances. In 1883, American railroads unilaterally divided the continent into four time zones. The U.S. government didn’t legally ratify this until 1918. The corporations moved first. Of course they did.

This is the template. Time standardized in service of commerce. Time as a management tool. Time as a way to coordinate labor, maximize output, and measure — and penalize — deviation from the norm.

And who set the norm? The same people who controlled the railroads, the factories, the plantation systems, the colonial governments. The people who had, for centuries, understood that controlling someone’s time was the most complete form of control available. You don’t need chains if you own the clock.

The language we use today reveals everything. “Time is money” — attributed to Benjamin Franklin, a man who owned enslaved people and understood intimately the economics of extracting time from bodies without compensation. “Don’t waste my time.” “Running out of time.” “Behind schedule.” “Falling behind.” The metaphors are relentlessly economic, militaristic, and drenched in scarcity. Time is a resource being depleted. You are always, potentially, losing it.

Other phrases make the threat more explicit. “On the clock” — meaning you belong to someone else now. “Deliverables.” “Bandwidth.” “Availability windows.” “Time management” — a phrase that would have baffled any human alive before 1800. The modern workplace has built an entire vocabulary to colonize your relationship with time before you have even opened your laptop. And if you push back, if you move at a different pace, if your relationship with the clock doesn’t match the dominant culture’s — there is a word for that too. They call it a problem.

CP Time and the Deep Resistance of Moving Differently

An African American colleague once described to me the concept known in Black communities as “CP Time” — She offered it with the particular tone of someone sharing something that is simultaneously a joke and not a joke at all. A knowing humor that holds something serious underneath.

What sits underneath is this: the long, well-documented history of using time as a weapon of control and humiliation against Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized people.

Enslaved people’s time was not their own — not by the minute, not by the season, not across generations. The plantation bell regulated waking, working, eating, sleeping. Time was expropriated entirely, completely, without apology. After emancipation, vagrancy laws criminalized the absence of employment — without someone else’s time to fill, your presence in public was itself a crime. Sharecropping systems trapped people in cycles of debt that made the future a permanent hostage. Mass incarceration, which disproportionately removes Black Americans from their lives, communities, and families, is at its core a technology of temporal theft — taking years, decades, lifetimes.

Against that backdrop, an elastic relationship with the institutional clock is not dysfunction. It is not a cultural deficiency to be corrected in a DEI workshop on punctuality. It is, at minimum, a reasonable response to centuries of having time weaponized against your body and your people. At most, it is wisdom. A refusal to let someone else’s urgency become your emergency.

Indigenous communities hold similarly distinct relationships with time — cyclical, relational, rooted in land and season rather than fiscal quarters. Many Indigenous languages don’t carry a grammatical future tense in the Western sense. Time is not a line stretching toward a destination. It is a living relationship with what is here, what has been, and what is returning.

These are not primitive frameworks waiting to be upgraded. They are different epistemologies. Different ways of knowing when you are, and what that means.

The Anxiety Machine

Here is what the dominant clock culture produces, reliably, in the bodies of the people living inside it: a chronic low-grade sense of emergency.

Time pressure creates cortisol. Cortisol sustained over time degrades memory, immune function, sleep quality, and decision-making. The American Psychological Association has tracked time pressure and overwork as top sources of chronic stress for decades. We have built a civilization that runs on a stress response designed for acute physical threat and then wondered why everyone is exhausted and making regrettable decisions.

“Out of time.” “No time.” “I don’t have time for this.” Listen to how often these phrases appear in a single workday. We have manufactured a scarcity that did not exist before we built the machine that produces it. And then we sold people planners, productivity apps, and time management seminars to help them cope with the machine we refuse to question.

Urgency, it turns out, is extraordinarily useful if you want people to stop thinking clearly. A person in a hurry is a person who skips steps, accepts shortcuts, defers to authority, and stops asking whether the destination was worth reaching in the first place. False urgency is one of the oldest tools of manipulation available. It works in sales, in politics, in war, and in every open-plan office in every city in the world.

The clock, weaponized, is a remarkably efficient way to keep people too busy to notice what is happening to them.

Taking Back Time

So what do we do with this?

We do not throw away the calendar. We do not romanticize a pre-industrial past that was also, let’s be honest, full of its own forms of suffering and control. We do not pretend that showing up when we said we would is a colonialist conspiracy rather than basic respect for other people’s lives.

But we can start asking different questions. Whose urgency is this, actually? Who benefits from my hurry? What would I notice, create, or become if I moved at the pace the work actually requires rather than the pace anxiety demands?

There is an old practitioner’s saying: go slow to go fast. It sounds paradoxical until you have watched enough rushed decisions unravel, enough shortcuts circle back as crises, enough people burn through their best thinking by spending it on artificial fires. Slowing down is not falling behind. It is often the only way to actually arrive somewhere worth being.

The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that the present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments. Not a productivity insight. A doorway. An invitation to stop treating now as a waiting room for later.

Your dog already knows this. The moon has always known this. The seeds know it every spring without being reminded.

We built the clock. We can also decide — not to smash it, but to stop letting it run us. To remember that it is a tool, not a truth. To reclaim the radical, ancient, deeply human act of marking time on our own terms: by what matters, by what’s alive, by what the season is actually asking of us.

Now, as it happens, is the perfect time to start.