At a recent writing workshop, I heard the term time blindness for the first time. The facilitator set alarms on her phone at intervals to remind her to move the topics forward. She said she tended to get absorbed in a discussion and lose track of the limited time we had.

I have had this chronic condition my entire life, but didn’t know it had a name. It is being lost in time. My sense of time is limitless. Time as shown on clocks and calendars doesn’t mean much to me. This condition leads to chronic lateness and procrastination. It also leads to constant nagging on the part of people who live with or around me. I’m a champ at ignoring nagging. My mother handed the job over to Ken when we married, and he’s taken the challenge seriously.

I managed as an adult and a parent to overcome some of the effects of time blindness because of other lives involved. But it creeps up on me, like a first cocktail after a year of sobriety. If left on my own, I’d be lost down the rabbit hole of time. Fortunately, I have a life partner, my husband, who is acutely aware of time. He can pull me back onto the boat in the river of time if I get too lost on a far shore.

On one hand, I like being lost in time. I write for hours without sensing the passage of time. It’s heaven on earth. On the other hand, it can be damned inconvenient when I have to make a sudden return to reality and rush to meet a deadline or an appointment or even make dinner before 10:00 pm. I have a cat who wants her dinner at 2:00 and attempts to get my attention starting around 1:30. She doesn’t persist for more than a few minutes, so when I don’t respond, she finds my husband to ask for dinner. He always accedes promptly to her request.

Time blindness has a sibling affliction. I am also directionally challenged or topographically disoriented. If I walk out my front door, there is a distinct possibility I will get lost. I can assert vehemently that something is to the right when everyone but me knows it is to the left. It happened once in Paris, when my friends and I left a restaurant after lunch to go to the Eiffel Tower and I turned left. I knew it was only a few blocks away – on the left. They stopped me. “We turn right,” they insisted. I was adamant that it was the opposite until they told me to look up and sure enough the Eiffel Tower loomed above the buildings on the right. My immediate response was, “When did they move it?”

On a different trip I was to meet up with friends at the Musée D’Orsay for lunch at the cafe. They were going to spend the morning at the Rodin museum, but I wanted to go to a workshop at the Fragonard Perfumery to learn how perfumes were made. I took the Metro from our apartment to the Perfumery in the Opera District and spent a couple of hours there. Then I decided to take a train back across town to the Left Bank, a really short ride, I thought. Well, you can guess what happened. I read the train route completely wrong. It didn’t go anywhere near the Left Bank, and when I realized my error, I was halfway to Versailles, about twenty minutes in the wrong direction. I got back to Musée D’Orsay just as they finished lunch. It is a good thing that being lost in a foreign city is one of my favorite things to do.

Even in my hometown, I frequently go off in a direction I am certain is correct, only to find I’ve traveled a few miles out of my way and must reverse course. This is a topic of amusement for my friends. Whenever I am the designated driver, there needs to be a designated navigator. I never know where I am. I can usually picture my destination if it is a place I travel to routinely, but how to get there is a mystery no matter how many times I’ve done it. Thank goodness for GPS. If we get to talking and my navigator is not paying close attention, it is a crap shoot where we end up – but it always ends in laughter. With my phone at the ready, I can stay relatively on course or at least arrive in the vicinity of my destination and eventually reach the goal.

My husband, as luck would have it, is the opposite. He can go somewhere once, and a map to that place is etched forever on his brain. He never makes a wrong turn. Even if we are in a faraway state that we once traveled through, he can find the restaurant we stopped at or the hotel we stayed in without a second’s hesitation. He can find my cousin’s farm in the middle of nowhere Kansas, without prompting. I’m always amazed. He is on time wherever he goes. That takes a special commitment when he is going somewhere with ‘always tardy’ me.

As they say, opposites attract. I would be floating in an ethereal void without Ken to tether me to the earth, a gentle but firm tether.

Now, I must stop writing, because I have to be at a meeting in thirty minutes and I need to get ready.