THE JOHANNESBURG DIARIES - TIME AND TIDE - #BLOGCHATTERA2Z2023
It is only when we move outside India that we realise the
significance of time zones. Johannesburg is three and a half hours behind India
and by the time we wake up in the morning here, it is already almost noon back
home. That is when things like phone calls must be timed right, unless we want
to wake up people or, on the contrary, be woken up at unearthly hours. It is
for that reason that I keep my watch on Indian Standard time just so I know what
time it is in India.
The other reason is that when I participate on writing
challenges, where one has to write every single day, I need to keep track of
midnight, which is when daily challenges end, which is 8.30 pm in Johannesburg.
Hence, I finish my daily poetry challenge early in the morning, preferably the
moment my eyes open and my A to Z blog posts sometime in the morning. That way
I can finish my writing early enough and have the rest of the day to do all the
interesting things like travelling, shopping, eating and of course, spending
quality time with the little ones! As Chaucer said so aptly, “Time and tide
wait for no man.”
Shakespeare had the right idea when he made Macbeth pronounce mournfully - “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time.”
Understandably so, as he was going through the throes of his wife’s untimely demise!
In Greek mythology, Kronos was the god of Time, the
king of the Titans, and believed to be a destructive force. Legend has it that
he deposed his father, Ouranos (Uranus) and reigned over the Golden Age. He and
Rhea, his wife, had several children, but petrified over a prophecy that said
that he would be deposed by his own son, Kronos swallowed each of his children
after they were born. A heartbroken Rhea hid away her youngest child, Zeus, in
the island of Crete. She hoodwinked her husband by feeding him a stone wrapped
in swaddling clothes.
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When Zeus was grown up, he forced his father to bring out
his swallowed offspring. He waged war for over ten years against his father and
the Titans and drove them into the pit of Tartarus. Zeus proclaimed himself the
king of the Olympians and ruled over them in Mount Olympus with his wife, Hera.
Generations later, he released his old father and made him the ruler of the
Elysian Islands (Home of the Blessed Dead).
Back to the present, where we are trying to do all that
we can do in the two months we are here. The Covid years took away precious
time that we could have spent with the little ones, and now that we are here, we
are determined to spend every moment with them fruitfully… whether its is
playing games with them, going to school to pick them up or going out with them
to restaurants which are child friendly.
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Z has just turned seven and S will be four in June. Every day brings new moments of joy… when Z reads whole sentences, even words that she does not know, when S breaks into a dance when he watches his favourite songs on television, when Nana patiently watches Frozen on television just because the little ones are watching it, when the two of them give us spontaneous hugs and tell us they love us… these are priceless moments which will stay imprinted in our hearts forever.
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