The other day a friend said to me: “I can’t believe it’s December already; what happened to November”

“ What happened to January?” was my half-ironic and fully sympathetic reply to my friend’s shock at fleeing time. I was invoking that month that kicks off the year, which kicked off 2013. But I was also invoking the coming January. It already seems impossibly gone— before it has arrived.

What is happening to time?

The time that marched day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade… Need I continue? Where is that time that marched like a herd of elephants trunk to tail. Is it vanished like those elephants progenitors, the mammoths and mastodons? Is it vanishing like the elephants themselves?

Time marches no more; they say it flies. Birds fly—fast and feathery—but not as fast as time. Time vanishes, evaporates, before it ever manifests it seems—is January 2014 somehow already gone? Is time melting with the glaciers and polar caps? Melting and evaporating at ever greater speeds, so that before January ever reaches us it is gone, or reduced to a trickle of hours and minutes lacking weeks or days?

What economic crisis? What climate crisis?

What about the time crisis?

Is it only the perceptions of an aging man? An aging year? And an aging World?

Or can time change like climates and economies?

But to change as quickly as underwear….

On my parents farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they had planted a hundred or so conifers back in the mid-70s— non-native Scotch pine, and native red pine, balsam fir and black spruce—The black spruce has taken to its re-introduction of their 40-acres once grazed to a weedy desert. Each year seedlings march out from the edges of the original forest they planted. This front of expanding forest is like a calendar to me, a giant clockwork of the beauty of letting land be, letting it grow.

Maybe, just maybe, if I let time be—if I don’t try to squeeze every last drop out of it— it will slow down, start recolonizing the desert I now stand in. Maybe it is this pursuit, this consumption of time, which has it running faster and faster away from me. And when I do catch it, lets it melt in my hands, evaporate into thin air: what happened to January? June? November?

December?

So I am wishing us all a time adjustment this year.

Plenty of time.

So much so that we can really enjoy it.

Or at least feel it move by at an elephantine pace, with an elephantine grace.