There is a certain rhythm in each day in our lives. Weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays, vacation days and all the other categories of days. Each has its own rhythm. No matter what your state and role in life, your time is rarely your own. There are demands upon you time and attention that are unrelenting, recurring, and unavoidable – even as they are welcomed and cherished.. It can be a rhythm that sets the current and flow upon which you navigate the day like an Olympic kayaker on rapids of the slalom course. It can be a tyrant that can drive you to want to strike back at Time. On the afternoon of February 15, 1894, a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, carried a homemade bomb in what was thought to be an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Royal Observatory which just 10 years earlier had been established as the global time standard — Greenwich Mean Time. Was it a symbolic revolutionary act to disrupt the tyranny of time? In any case, he wasn’t the only one to attack clocks during this period: In Paris, rebels simultaneously destroyed public clocks across the city, and in Bombay, protestors shattered the famous Crawford Market clock with gunfire. Continue reading →