Marking Time

I don’t remember exactly how the subject of the full moon came up. Something about it being Halloween, I think.

Anyway, as we were chatting and packing up our work-out clothes at the gym, I said something about it maybe being a full moon. He said he thought it was, and he knew because he followed a different calendar. A lunar calendar. A “Middle Eastern calendar,” he said. Cautious, sadly, to tell a white stranger that it was Islamic.

But I asked, if he didn’t mind telling me, did he mean the Islamic calendar? He did, and maybe sensing a friendly audience – at least I hope so – he went on to explain that that calendar is 10 days shorter than the calendar we use in the rest of the world.

I asked if that was why the holy month of Ramadan started earlier each year. He said yes, but then paused for just a moment and said, “But, you know, for us it starts on the same day every year.”

Mind blown, right there in a Lifetime Fitness locker room.

We all experience time. We live in and through it. We know how to track it. To measure it. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. Easy, right?

Until we find out that time isn’t the same for all of us. That something as simple as counting a year can be done in a completely different way. Not better, not worse. Not more or less true. Just different.

God. Divinity. Spirit. The holy or sacred. Faith and meaning. They’re like that. We go through life pretty sure we know what they are. Or aren’t. And then somebody tells us that they can be something else altogether. And a window opens. Our world is expanded and maybe a little brighter.