Time Travel with the International Date Line

or, how missing a day can lead to magic

My January is going to be one day shorter than yours. I’m never going to experience January 25th, because I’ll be crossing the International Date Line and skipping straight from the 24th to the 26th. And I’m not even going to get to double-live another date with which to compensate for what I’ve missed. My travel in the other direction will be so slow that I’ll regain the hours one by one. There’s never going to be a jump backwards that will let me repeat a day and call it January 25—in what would surely be a confusing time-hop.

So, what to do about this lost day? In truth, I’ll be on a plane either sleeping or watching movies, so I doubt I’ll notice anything. But I don’t know. This is new for me. Do you see a sunrise only once? Or do you have any other weird planetary/solar-related visions a la that thing in Star Wars with the two suns? I worry the whole experience will be boring, a non-event. And at the same time I hope the experience will be a non-event.

But then again, that’s exactly what it is. For me, January 25th will be A Non-Event.

We all talk often about walking away from our assigned and self-assigned tracks to find time for ourselves, even if only temporarily. We (or, ok, at least I do this) wish for an extra day or two larded into our weeks when we can: sit on the couch, read, eat a scone, have nice hot coffee. This is my dream, anyway. My vision is of a day that’s just added into the sweep of life, so that I don’t miss anything but somehow also get to slow things down and savor a selection of things that bring me ease and joy.

Now, with The Missing 25th, I’ll be experiencing the opposite. I’m giving up a day.

Let me be clear. I signed up for this. This whole thing is happening because I’m realizing a life-long dream—a realization put into place four pandemic-delayed years ago—to go to Antarctica. And because I’m going to the Ross Sea and not the peninsula, I’m starting my journey from New Zealand and ending it in Argentina. It’ll be a polar-coastal semi-circumnavigation, if you will. And though it will take me roughly thirty days, I guess I’m only going to experience 29 of them.

I’ve been pushing hard, athletically and creatively (and generally, in my life as writer, editor, teacher, publisher) for at least the last eight months. In athletic terms, specifically, I’ve been on since April, training for one big event or another. The only week off I’ve had from training came in the days after the Athens Marathon, during which I still walked all around Athens visiting friends and family.

I’m overdue for some rest. Being on a boat for thirty twenty-nine days will bring some rest, for sure. Again, to be clear, I’ve chosen these events, this big, long training chunk. I’m no pro athlete. I do this for fun.

These questions have been on my mind, though, lately—as athlete, as creative, and now, too, as traveler.

• What do we really do with our time?

• Do we notice it?

• Do we watch it pass, in a way that’s productive?

• Do we savor it?

(These questions partly fueled the writing of my third novel, Last Days in Plaka, which comes out in early April.)

When I lose a day, what I want to do is this: to stand on the other side of it, on January 26th in Auckland, NZ, and look figuratively behind me to the time I didn’t spend. What happened in there? The newspaper will tell me, surely. But I want to look behind me as if at a gift. Somewhere in the time of my experience, there will be a space that we mark out as the 24 hours of January 25th. I won’t have lived it, technically. But of course I did! There’s stuff in there. The 25th of January can gape wide and wider. I can fill it with whatever I want. I have a weird idea that instead of feeling panic at the time I was robbed, I can feel expansive about it. I will, after all, have time traveled. There’s magic in that, and perhaps there’s energy and ease and inspiration in the time that I’ll have traveled over.

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What would you do with an extra day? How would you feel about a lost day? And most importantly, have you crossed the Date Line? What was it like?!