Every day, thousands of westbound airline passengers leapfrog over an entire day. They take off from, say, Oakland on a Monday and land in Auckland on a Wednesday.

No, really. It’s what happens when you cross the International Date Line. The line is imaginary, but the effects are real.

Global Gazing

Remember when everyone’s home had a globe? In the 1960s, advanced technology meant that through the magic of electricity and a toggle switch, a globe could light up from the inside. Whoa!

If you were a kid back then, you gazed in awe at the illuminated raised relief, marveling at mountains and the depths of the bright blue oceans.

Dust off that globe now and you’ll see that the International Date Line isn’t a fixed line. It zigzags giddily to either side of 180 degrees longitude like the wake of a drunken sailor.

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Wednesday

Some of Magellan’s sailors probably thought they’d knocked back a pint too many after their own time travel adventure in 1522. As Antonio Pigafetta reported:

On Wednesday, the ninth of July, we arrived at . . . Santiago . . . And we charged our men in the boat that, when they were ashore, they should ask what day it was. They were answered that to the Portuguese it was Thursday, at which they were much amazed.

So amazed that, once Magellan’s impeccable record keepers figured it out, they sent a special delegation to alert the Pope. He, in turn, was so amazed that he called a conference. A mere three centuries later, the International Date Line became official. The boundary between one day and the next was set.

Racing to Places

By definition, travel is moving from one place to another place. Like a token on a game board, you advance from Country A to Country B.

For some, travel is a competitive game. Recently, travel magazines profiled a woman whose mission is to become the fastest person to visit all 195 of the world’s sovereign countries.

Places in Time

Time travel lights up the raised relief map of your brain, revealing the Valley of Jet Lag and the Mountains of Giddy Realization: I’m here! I’m on the other side of the planet!

It toys with your internal clock, making you narcoleptic at noon, insomniac at midnight, and ravenous at four a.m.

It makes you silly: “Greetings from the Future!” you text your family, who are back in that earlier time zone.

It makes you grin: As a traveling freelancer in New Zealand, you’re one day ahead of U.S. deadlines. Yippee!

It makes you hyper-aware: After clearing customs in Auckland, you enter the bustling airport café. It’s 5 a.m. local time, yet the woman who hands you a mug of coffee sings, “Here you are, lovey” with a bright-eyed smile.

It makes you think: While you were snoozing over the South Pacific, she was catching her bus in Manukau, the dim silhouettes of suburban bungalows slowly un-fuzzing as dawn edged over Hauraki Gulf to etch steel and glass towers against the sky.

Oh, I see: Below the surface of what we experience and exchange lie the complex route maps of all our time travel adventures.

A Planet for All Seasons

In crossing the International Date Line, I’ve also crossed from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere. Like other imaginary map lines, its effects are real. As I write this in May, it’s autumn in New Zealand.

Across New Zealand, forests are ablaze with autumn, their vibrant leaves glowing against snow-capped volcanic peaks. New arrivals from the Northern Hemisphere say, “Oh, the seasons are reversed.”

But are they? Or is this another example of Earth’s symmetry? As spring surges toward summer in one half, autumn yields to winter in the other half.

As Earth’s seasons perform their balancing act, we humans seek an impossible balance between defying time and deferring to it. What if we simply observed its presence and its passage?

Imagine if your travels through a place were moment-to-moment. Imagine that, in the time it takes for the world’s fastest traveler to blaze a record-breaking trail through dozens of countries, you were still meandering along, savoring the slowly shifting here and now.

World’s Slowest Traveler?

The number of countries I’ve covered in 5 weeks plus the number I’ll visit in the next 7 add up to a grand total of (drum roll) . . . one. Over the coming weeks, I’ll share stories of New Zealand, from its staggering natural beauty to its wonderful people.

Until then, imagine that each of us was traveling on the surface of an illuminated globe. Imagine that every night we sailed through an ocean of stars, and every morning we woke up in a place of new possibilities.