Head of School’s Notebook: Marking Time

April 29, 2022

It is that time of the year. Spring Family Weekend has passed and the dulcet tones of the musical, Mamma Mia, are a lingering memory. Seniors are counting the days to commencement. Underclassmen are imagining the summer that lies just over a month – and an exam period – away. And faculty are trying to find every possible moment in the span of the year remaining to accomplish in their classes all they imagined they would in those heady days of August when the expanse of the school year seemed to rush luxuriously out in front of us.

It all looks different from early May. It feels different, too. Those of us in schools, students and faculty, measure time in the increments of our world – in N weeks and S weeks, outings weeks, exam weeks, and senior weeks; in family weekends, game days, free days, winter breaks, and spring breaks; in assemblies, Servons speeches, and advisory dinners; and ultimately in trimesters, sunset ceremonies, awards ceremonies, baccalaureate services and commencements.

Time is not constant on our Mesa. We move with it, of course, but especially in moments like this one, we are drawn back even as we rush headlong into the future.  Our seniors lament the impending ending even as they celebrate it, hearkening back to moments years ago when the idea of graduating was a vague dream and wondering how it suddenly became so near. Like Gatsby, we are all occasionally “borne back … into the past.” And we are measuring our days now not simply in the ordered rituals of this place, but in the time we have left with each other.

Gloria Naylor’s wonderful Sapphira Wade noted at the end of Mama Day, “The last time we do a thing, knowing it is the last time, is always more meaningful than the first.”  Maybe, too, the fact that this year is devoted to the experience of time – our inquiry question – has heightened our sensitivity – like Fitzgerald noted of those fine instruments that measure vibrations in the earth’s crust – so that we can feel time’s ebbs and flows, the constant that isn’t so constant.

We are far from the first to wrestle with marking time. Two millennia ago the Egyptians and then the Greeks ordered our world chronologically, giving rise to measurements of day and night, hours, minutes, months, and years. They did so by looking to the stars and measuring the earth’s journey around the sun, building a structure that would hold until 1967, when scientists changed the manner by which time itself is measured.

Noting that the earth’s journey around the sun – much like a school year – is not truly constant and consistent (we have lost approximately 3 hours in 2000 years because the orbit of the planets in our solar system is ever so gradually slowing), a decision was made to look not to the heavens but to the atom to calibrate time. Cesium, an element with relatively heavy, sluggish, easy-to-track atoms enabled scientists to redefine the second, the basis of measuring time.

Essentially, the scientists fired microwaves at cesium 133 atoms until they emitted a packet of light called a photon. Scientists then measured the wavelengths of the emitted photons – among the most constant things in nature – and determined that over the course of one second, 9,192,631,770 waves passed. Doesn’t sound heavy or sluggish to me, but that’s atomic time. Interestingly, the second is being calibrated again right now, thanks to significantly advanced technology over the last 50 years. The effort is being led by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (known as BIPM, its French acronym), a subset of which is the Consultative Committee for Time and Frequency.

I confess, I never would have imagined that such an entity might exist. And yet, how could it not? The BIPM was created to ensure common standards not simply for science but for commerce, collaboration, universal truth. Worthy indices and intentions, surely.

But it is hard not to imagine that the never-ending effort to order and understand time and its passage is also an existential exercise, a way to better comprehend the character and cadence of the human experience. That journey from astronomical time to atomic time is not unlike the lessons of a school year and the unspoken wonderings that occupy our minds in these waning weeks. Like those scientists at BIPM, all of us on the Mesa are measuring our seconds, relishing each wave and wavelength, each glance skyward and each moment that grounds us in the now, knowing the preciousness of time spent in places and with people who matter to us.

With such precision and sensitivity we mark another memorable spring on the Mesa.