20080217

Time

As a kid I had no sense of time. Sure I could read clocks and watches, and had some sense that events were scheduled. But I don't recall really connecting it all. I had to go to school, but that was a matter of melding into the patterns of the family. I had favorite TV shows, but it only occurred to me later in childhood that there was any use in finding out their scheduled times. Just flip the switch and see what's on. After school hours with friends or alone just flowed together into a timeless activity block between school and dinner, dinner and sleep, whenever those actually happened.

In my teen and young adult years, my dad always said he was amazed how I could get by without a watch. It really was no major thing to me. Clocks are nearly ubiquitous, as are other people with watches, if you actually find you need to know the time. I can keep track of passing time if I need to, but timekeeping doesn't play a role if deadlines are loose or absent. Now with everybody carrying wireless phones, I wonder how watches even sell at all. (Until they finally deliver on those computer/phone/video/watches we were all promised by Dick Tracy and Inspector Gadget.)

I'm not nearly so much the night owl many of my friends and acquaintances are (and my cat pretty much insists I get up to feed her every morning about six) but I find I enjoy the dark hours, at least in part because they are so timeless. One hour merges in with the next. With no externally imposed schedule, I find myself wondering how much a sense of time any of us have. If you're not meeting someone else's deadline, does it really matter to you if it's six or seven, one or two? In the dark hours, only my own fatigue and current activity/interest are my guides. Time is a quality that is useful at times, but not essential to the human experience. One may attempt to objectively measure a duration of time if one finds a need, but the human mind can make time's passing an ephemeral thing.

In relativity, no two events can properly be said to occur simultaneously. In some of the proposed solutions to uniting quantum mechanics and general relativity, time divides out of the equation. I can't really pretend I understand what that means, but the articles in the science rags say that time isn't necessarily a variable against which other variables change, the other physical variables simply change as a function of one another. "Clocks don't measure time, 'time' is whatever it is clocks measure." Maybe the universe doesn't care what time it is in those dark hours either.

1 comment:

Sra said...

That explains a lot about you as a child. You were always a bit removed from the world, it seemed.

It's only since I've been in the working world for a few years that I've come to appreciate the freedom you have as a child to neglect time. There is so much urgency imposed upon us in society. But like you say, what is the big difference between one hour and the next? In a way, it's like the difference between one grain of sand and two: technically different, but for all practical purposes, it's just a bit of dust.

I wish we could reclaim the time of life by letting it go again.

 
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