Time and the clock.

My daughter’s alarm clock is blaring through her door as regular pulses reminiscent of the loud echoing blasts announcing a prisoner escape.  How she is sleeping through it amazes me.  Her strategy is to have multiple devices yell at her land of nod until one or another pierces the veil of her dreamscape enough for her to join the world of the awake.  She then stumbles up and out of her room towards the bathroom and the beginning of her morning.

It puts me in mind of how much of what we do is regulated by time.

We have the “masters” of the industrial revolution to thank for that one; having invented mechanized devices as the means of production, they needed a “regular” workforce to man and woman those machines.  Hence our alarm clocks which still beckon us (more like rip us) from the delicious warmth of bed and dreams into the world of work and dare I say a bit of drudgery???

Not so the boxer’s time clock!  Least ways not in my estimation.

Those intervals of time feel more like the explosions of musical notes with three minutes to blow your ax before resting and blowing again.

Shadow boxing around my living room gets to feel like an improvisational dance, throwing punches this way and that as I circle my way left then right, hop skipping forward or to the side, my arms flailing at the air to their own rhythm.  Then the dead s-t-o-p before repeating it all again — and yet different.

A jazzed solo, the improvisation of a boxing performance has all of the nuanced grace of a horn pushing out its notes in a staccato rhythm all its own and yet timed and lovely and full of melodic undertones, the dance of the body fluid and full of the momentum that pushes it from one posture to another for three full minutes before the ding of the bell signals the end of the round.