Going to India, you lose a day. We did it in two legs of about 8 hours each with a 5-hour layover. With time to and from the airport, it turned into a 26-hour experience. We left on a Wednesday night and got in early in the morning on Friday. Thursday all but disappeared in the mix.
Coming back, flying westward the opposite happens. We arrived home the same day we left even though it was again about 26 hours of actual travel time end-to-end.
The time played havoc with my body, and periodically my brain seemed to pretty much shut off. I affectionately refer to the experience as the wall of sleep, which occasionally came unbidden at all but the usual times.
As I write, it is Sunday night and I am finally feeling like my daily energy groove is back, though I still have a flickering of another time zone in my awareness. I am going through a time shift.
In his book, The Order of Time, Italian quantum physicist, Carlo Rovelli, busts myths about time. The one that stuck with me the most was that it is not simply now everywhere. Physical phenomena have their own time, local to their place in the universe, and not shared. That’s how I feel, between two time zones, neither one being my now.
“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
Bertrand Russell
