New Time

Today I bought a new digital clock/alarm/radio. A $15 investment. My old one had been dying a slow death, accented for weeks by an irritating and loud ‘Bleep!’ every few seconds. I had noticed the frequency and sound were both increasing. Still, I procrastinated. Finally, last night, I hit the radio button, intending to drift off to sleep whilst listening to a song or two. Instead, I was rewarded with silence, broken only by that deafening ‘Bleep!’. This morning I tried again, hoping to hear a few classic favorites before I succumbed to the need to actually get out of bed for the day. Again, only silence with the ‘Bleep’ sound.

I admitted a drive to Walmart was in my immediate future. Since I was there, might as well get that new watch band I had also been putting off replacing. A $14 investment. So now, new clock installed and set and new watchband on my wrist, it all got me to thinking.

The clock had been with me since the last decade. When I was still married and living several states away. A part of my previous life. The watchband was damaged this summer while hospitalized. Why was I so reluctant to replace things that did not hold particularly fond memories for me? Odd question I thought.

Maybe it’s not so much the fact the memories are not altogether pleasant, but that the unforeseen future is just that–more unknown. It’s new. And, ironically, both items involve time. Clock. Watch. Tick and Tock. Yin and Yang.

So I don’t have any ready answers to the question but I do have a new awareness. Time passes. The old is replaced with new. Whether it be life circumstances or life events, all things occur or change. Time will march on, steadily onward. We measure it with hours and minutes, days, months and years, life periods. In these two cases, one was marked by a time when I was married. Before that changed. The other was marked by a surgery and complications that I am still recovering from months later. It is the inanimate objects that mark the time for me.

So I think I shall embrace this new clock/radio to remind me my married life is in the past. It has been for years now. Time to move past it. Likewise, I shall use the new watchband to remind myself the time spent in the hospital is done. I have only a full recovery to look forward to.