Some Personal Observations The Nature of Time

What Sparked This Off

This is another example of me proving I can be inspired and write about anything.

My friend Cathy Holmes posted this on Facebook:

“Why is it that 60 years goes by in a blink, but 60 seconds takes a decade?

Me, waiting for the microwave to heat my coffee.”

And that got me thinking about theories, my own experiences, and why these things happen.

Why Time Passes Slowly

Usually when you are doing something, especially if you enjoy what you are doing, time seems to pass fairly rapidly although you know that time generally passes at the same rate, it just doesn’t seem like that.

If you are watching a boring TV program, listening to a turgid lecture or a record you don’t like it seems they will never end.

Then there is the situation where you are waiting for something to happen or finish. They say a watched pot never boils and paint never seems to dry.

In “The Eighty Minute Hour” by Brian Aldiss the premise is that the controllers slow down timepieces during the working day and speed them up when people are outside of work, and if that were real how would we actually know? You know damned well when you are at work on a boring day that the clock seems to freeze.

In his wonderful book “Reasons To Stay Alive” (which I wrote about in the article linked at the end of this Matt Haig says suggests that a kiss will stop time for you and that is the feeling you get when you do kiss someone that you love. He also wrote a book called “How To Stop Time” which is a wonderful temporal fantasy and worth losing some of your time reading.

Although it’s not always practical to do something else when you are waiting for something to happen, if you can occult your mind you will find that it does not present a problem, but when you are waiting for a traffic light to change from red to green you really have to keep concentrating otherwise you may end up attracting the ire of the car drivers behind you.

Time Travel

We all know “Doctor Who” and “Back To The Future” and other Time Travel scenarios, and they make us aware of the awful paradoxes and effects of what could happen if we were able to travel in time. In one of his stories, he suggests that time consists of chronons which are consumed to create the present, so the future is not yet woven and the past has been consumed so the concept of time travel is an absolute nob-starter in that universe.

Some Of My Personal Observations

When I was a kid we got six weeks of summer holiday when I was at Primary School and when I went to Grammar School aged ten, that went up to eight weeks. We really didn't know what to do with all that free time but we found stuff to do.

If you think about it when I was six years old I had a week of holiday for every year of my life. The equivalent today would be sixty-five weeks of summer holiday, can you imagine that? As we get older we view time based on the time we have spent living even though we don’t realise it.

Conclusion

So my sixty-five years seem to have flown by because they are now in my past, but they have given me a wealth of experience and memories, and I am still building them now. Weekends and holidays seem shorter every time but I still fill them and enjoy them.

I always look for the positives, remember the good times and forget the bad. I am a very forgiving person because my time is too precious to not spend it on the best things I can which is why I seek out and appreciate wonderful friends and experiences.