I'm out of time. Not running short on it: I'm outside the usual stream of it. One way of looking at this unit that we measure our lives by is that it's like a bunch of different streams all running in the same direction. I feel like Asha and I are in our own little stream here in Madrid. Partly it's because we traveled here: the act creates its own offshoot stream in time through the oddly shaped days, byproducts of moving across time zones. Travelers dip in and out of these offshoots, unique streams that eventually vanish as one adapts to the rising and falling of the sun in a new place. Adapting here in Madrid is made more complicated by the fact that Spain has a whole different rhythm than home. It's like that scene in Whiplash: "Not quite my tempo." Breakfast isn't the deal I make it at home; lunch waltzes in late; dinner hides until late into the night.
I'm not complaining, really. It's just that we are in this one stream of time and I keep looking at everyone else in that bigger stream, wondering what it feels like.
Sometimes this feeling of out of time is a revealing one: the strange aliveness of early mornings or late nights. Riding those streams, one can capture different parts of the human experience. Still, being out of time like Asha and I are at the moment isn't always what one wants: it's fun to be not only the same place but the same time as everyone else. If time is subjective, there might be some value in buying into the collective experience of a community in time. I think Asha and I might be chasing that more than anything as we wander through Spain.
Eventually, we will return to the bigger river and the stream we're passing through right now could be lost forever. For this moment out of time, though, we are in a whole new world of experience. Maybe "suspended in time" means that you've temporarily stepped out of the main community of time to exist in your own stream for a moment. From this place out of time, you can look on at the main river and wonder where it's all taking us. I guess all we know is that it's somewhere downstream.