Like so many children, I read the Narnia Chronicles when I was young. And like so many children, I loved it. But there was one aspect that I couldn’t really warm up to – the Narnia time. Time in Narnia flowed differently than time in the “real” world. When you crossed over to Narnia time seemed normal but when you got back, you came back at more or less the same time you left. But when you went back to Narnia again, you never knew how much time has passed – an hour, a week, a century… Now, as for different time flow I could understand the concept of that but the variable speed was weird and I found it fake and invented just to make the whole thing easy for the writer.
Fast forward two decades. I so get the Narnia time now. You see, living and taking care of a baby and now young toddler makes me slip between the “real” time and Narnia time only it’s the opposite here. The baby time in the “normal” time – she has fairly regular timings and durations for playing, sleeping, whining etc. It is the time in the “real” world that is unpredictable. Somehow the same exact action and gestures while taking care of Saboodlette that seem in baby time to take equal amount of minutes and hours last different amounts of time according to the “real” world clock. So for example the morning (waking up, feeding, playing, breakfast) can take anything between 1 and 3 hours. And I swear we always proceed at the same pace and speed. Go figure.
