The New Time

Introduction

This is a five year old post from my Seven Days In blog with my thoughts on getting older and why time might seem to go much faster, also with a couple of books that you might like to sample, which also touch on the nature of time.

This is the blog as it is now:

The New Time

One of the problems with getting older is that the days seem to get shorter and you seem to have less time to do things; well, that's how I feel. A number of people with children want to get the children back to school, mainly because they are missing their friends, and of course, looking after young children 24/7 is not an easy task.

The thing is that six weeks of lockdown for a six year old is a fiftieth of their life, whereas for me it's one five hundredth, so it seems a lot longer for them than it does for me, although the actual time is the same.

I am now trying to find a way of perceiving time in the same way that a child does, and see a week's holiday or even a weekend as a long time. A weekend is around 62 hours from work finish to work start for most Monday to Friday workers, and we should be able to see that as time to enjoy and do things.

I'm often reminded of "The Eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss, where the controllers speed up clocks when we are not at work and slow them down when we are at work, and if that were happening, would we know?

People often waste weeks wishing for Friday. I used to be like that, but now I think "What Can I Do Today?". If you are always looking forward to Friday, you effectively throw away five days of your week, and the weekend is only two days, so that makes your time seem to fly by.

My aim is not only to slow time down, but to do more in that time. I often am bothered by going for walks because, by its nature, that takes time, although usually I listen to music while walking, as they are complementary activities and listening to music can almost make the activity go faster. The paradox is that you want to finish your walk, but you want to enjoy your time doing it, and if time speeds up, you feel you are losing out.

Matt Haig wrote one of his excellent books, "How To Stop Time" which also took this as part of his premise, and his self-help page from "Reasons To Stay Alive" is excellent, so I am now FEELING TIME as well as taking my final part in the #maywriteabit, because tomorrow is the first of June.

So what song should we go with? There are many songs called "Time", Pink Floyd and David Bowie come to mind, and even "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale and "Minutes" by The Human League.

I decided to go with "The Waiting" by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers as it is sort of appropriate for the position we are in now and does contain a lot of pertinent lines to the lockdown situation.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope I have given you a few things to think about.

I am sure that one day I will run out of things to share from my blog, but if interesting things keep appearing, I will keep sharing them on Vocal.#