Opinion: Soaking in the season of chur

Let's toast to feeling good, to soaking in the season of <i>chur.</i>. PHOTO/FILE

Stop the clock. Do you long to stop it or smash it each December? A friend who's celebrating her 50th birthday this week remarked how quickly the past 11 months have flown. "Where did this year go?" she asked. I can barely recall November, though my Facebook page tells me it happened.

Nowhere do I see evidence of time's transit more clearly than on maturing faces and elongating limbs of children. Adorable milk teeth morph into crooked adult choppers that will require upwards of $8000 in orthodontia.
Trainers that fitted two months ago are suddenly small. Visit an intermediate class at the start of one year and return at the end: beholding towering preteens is like entering a wormhole in the space-time continuum. Suddenly, I'm R2-D2 peering up at HanSolo. These men-children and women-kids (especially) prove time has a jet propulsion pack.

Stop the clock. While months and years are modern constructs, it's hard to think about time other than how we're socialised.

Western cultures equate time with money - plumbers charge by the hour; lawyers by the minute; and TV ad time by the second. Hurry up: we're wasting precious coin. US psychologist Robert Levine writes beliefs about time remain profoundly different from one community to the next, that cultural differences can be as vast as those between languages. "The world over, children simply pick up their society's conceptions of early and late, of waiting and rushing, of the past, the present, and the future, as they mature." When we're hustling between the school pickup, football training and Girl Guides, my 12-year-old daughter often asks, "Are we late?"

Many cultures use social activities to define their calendars rather than the other way around. Levine cites the Nuer people in the Sudan. They know the month of kur is happening because they're building fishing dams and cattle camps. I propose Kiwis recognise the month of chur because we're taking a break, swimming in the sea, drinking cold beverages and wagging responsibilities. The "month" will end when we change the clocks back and the season of bugger begins.

As a teenager, my cousin used to list clock-stoppers in a word game called, 'I would rather'. It consisted of hideous things she'd prefer to the hour's horrible task. When faced with cleaning her room, she'd say, 'I would rather - make a budget, do maths, talk about my weight...' It's one way to press pause - do something so tedious, we're counting seconds until the end. We're too brief for that. I'd feel nearly immortal if faced with a Mobius strip of cleaning an infant car seat after a nappy blowout. Or working on my taxes. Or sitting through back-to-back school prizegivings (At least my daughter received awards. My son got a leaver's certificate with a warning: "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." Only it didn't really say that).

I stop time most mornings via my sports watch, because waiting for traffic doesn't count when you're running. Still, seconds tick on. Children grow. Crows scratch deeper and deeper at the corners of my eyes. Suburbs expand, new homes so close, neighbours could reach out to pass a cup of sugar. Commutes lengthen.

Somewhere between performances of Ma te mahi ka ora and Justin Timberlake's Can't Stop the Feeling, a mum at my son's primary school leavers' assembly said, "I can't believe they're already heading to intermediate. It's always changing, isn't it?" Time marches like my 11-year-old son, who today wore tuxedo pants two sizes too small. Left foot, right foot...

Friends who meditate seem to mitigate the march. They're not stopping the clock; they're tabling the task list. Taking a moment to notice. To breathe. They say it helps them focus under the relentless strain of the clock. I've tried it, and liked it. Then I forget about it. The schedule becomes a thief, stealing my resolve to pause.

My just-turned-50 friend, during her birthday lunch, offered a short course in appreciation. Rather than bemoan the acceleration of days leading to superannuation, she raised her glass of bubbles, saying, "I'm really fit, I'm really healthy and I'm feeling really good."

Are we ever ready to turn the next corner? To send our primary school munchkins to intermediate; to wave goodbye as our adolescents sprint to college and uni? For now, let's toast to feeling good, to soaking in the season of chur. I'll make time for that.