It's the end of the year, and often this is the season where people exclaim "Wow, I can't believe a year went by so fast", or "It's Christmas already?!" Why do people feel like time is flashing before their eyes? Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
I think that we should take this moment to reflect how we use our time and what we can do to slow down our perception of it. Why do we perceive time to be going by so fast, slipping between our fingers? Hours turn into days, days into weeks , and suddenly months and years go by.
Time is a very finite resource for each of us, and every minute we have less of it here on earth. I like this Tolkien riddle about time:
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town
And beats high mountain down.
I realized that for the most part, I lose track of time if I am having a good time & it's only during arduous processes that it seems like time slows down- like holding a difficult yoga pose, having to go pee, or waiting for something to load.
Radiolab, one of my favorite podcasts, did an episode on the perception of time, titled Falling.
In this episode, David Eagle, a neuroscientist, talks about a experience that changed his life forever. When he was eight, he was playing on a the roof of a house under construction. He stepped toward the edge of the roof, which turned out to be tar paper. He fell through the roof & time seemed to slow down. He actually had several thoughts, pondering if he could grab the edge of the roof, realized it was too late for that, and as he neared the brick below, he thought about how it was like Alice & Wonderland, and if this is how she felt when she fell down the rabbit hole. The fall was 12 feet and last .86 seconds…. It left him wondering how people have these long drawn out thoughts in life & death situations. For the conclusion, I'll let you listen to the podcast. (His segment starts around 6:30). The point is, what affects our perception of time & what happens in our brains when time slows down?
Do we need to be suffering or have life/ death situations to have time slow down? If we do what we enjoy, will time inevitably be gobbbled up before we know it? Or could it be that the best use of our time is to lose track of time?…
Time is a fascinating thing. It’s humorous how we perceive time compared to the grand expanse of time that is existence. A two or three hour root canal at the dentist can seem like an eternity for one of us, and it’s not even a grain of sand in the scheme of the history of the earth, let alone the history of the universe.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the David Eagle story and micro-perception being expanded to macro-perception in an instant, I think a certain amount of stress is required for a brief moment (for these purposes, a moment measured in seconds or a fraction of a second) to be perceived by one as a significant expanse of time. However, “stress” doesn’t necessarily have to describe a negative situation in this context. For example, any athlete or musician who has felt “in the zone” has experienced something to this effect when everything is going right. In my better moments in auditions and performances, I’ve recalled feeling like a passage of notes is in slow motion and that I was completely in control of every single one. It may have felt like the passage took minutes, but in reality it was only five or ten seconds long.
On a (much) larger scale, it’s an inevitable consequence of the human experience that, overall, time is going to seem to snowball out of control from birth to death. Each day becomes less and less of a percentage of our total existence, which would lead one to think that each day would lose importance in our memory. This is true to an extent- the borders between days seem to blur more and more as we age- but the experiences that we start to have are more significant (ie. moving away from home, getting married, having children). Obviously, there are moments where we feel like we’re gasping for air as days fly by more and more quickly, but it’s certainly more important to hold on to the experiences that we’re having rather than holding on to the manmade measurements of when everything happens and at what rate it’s happening. I don’t necessarily think it’s a negative or positive thing to wallow in time or to lose track of it. In a moment that you’re enjoying, you can try to say to yourself “Hold on, I need to remember this,” but in the end, it usually robs you of that moment. It’s dangerous to take the people or things that you love for granted, but time is only the vehicle through which we experience those things, and thus, I don’t know if it’s practical to try and consciously alter our perception of time.
I remember being so annoyed as a kid that whenever I would tell an adult that time seemed to pass by at such an idle pace they would always reply with a good ol, "wait til you're older, time starts to fly by". Now I know what they meant. Rita, remember the invaluable lesson we learned in Bali about ENJOYING time and where you're at? Basically it was that instead of trying to always be rushing towards the next thing and where we had to be next, we need to enjoy wherever it is we are in that moment. Obligation for whatever is next blocks us from fully giving ourselves up to the moment. Whatever it is that has to be done next (be it dishes, sightseeing, appointments, etc.) could wait for as long as needed to get the maximum amount of richness that your current location was ready to give you.
ReplyDeleteI like how this guy perceives experiencing life and death and dreams. He is this insane and awesome base jumper- I mean he flies in a squirrel suit! I recommend watching the whole thing, its only 10 minutes. Or better yet, the 45 minute documentary on the guy.
Jeb Corliss GoPro- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhmzmOwkRuM
Fearless: The Jeb Corliss Story- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vSxehUmv3M
Super cool jump (watch for fun): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k&feature=related
The moment...its how we each view it that determines how it opens up to us, and in turn influences our capacity to experience life.
In the 1st grade. Melanie Yuen taught me to eat Handi-Snacks by nibbling each cracker, in order to maximize time spent eating it (since we were only provide 3 or 4 crackers). I think that's why I'm a slow eater, I like to savor flavors and relish in the mix of my mouth.
ReplyDeleteI think we're on the same track: stop to smell the roses. On the drive home in traffic, laying in bed before sleeping, sitting on the toilet...take a moment to savor your life and your health, your feet and your shoulders, the wall, the eggs in the refrigerator, the KY lube on your desk, the light bulbs, and your parents being alive, the batteries in your remote control, your boyfriend's stubble, and that cool new jacket you bought recently, the smell of rubbing alcohol, the feeling of clothes fresh from the dryer, a bagel, that sock behind the washer...
...you guys get the point. There's so much wonderful around us. Take the time to rejoice about everything in your life. What do you guys savor?
i run in circles on this because i tie time to desire and memory. i know that the reason we have strong memories is because they are related to a direct emotion. think about any childhood memory you have, you will easily be able to attach it to a specific emotion: fear, happiness, anger, etc.
ReplyDeletewhen i think of how time "moves," and what you (rita) are pointing out, i link it to the feelings i had connected to memories which seem "long" and ones that seem not long enough. the long ones are obviously the bad emotions .. going through a rough breakup for example. although i consider my life to be generally positive, i find that overall i can recall more "bad" emotion memories than good ones. im not sure if this true of everyone, though.
i would love to see a survey of the emotions connected to the majority of memories a person can recall, and then weigh the effect that those emotions have against the amount of time you felt it took "long" or "short."
this is such a stretch, but i propose that negative energy in the universe ACTUALLY takes more time to process and recover from than good energy. to this i would say:
humans are meant to experience positive energy; it is against our nature to face the negative, which is why it "feels" longer.
I recently had a conversation with my friend greg, who some of you know. We were talking about time, and he brought up the question of what happened before the universe was created. It was an interesting question to me because it made me realize that the idea of time really only applies to our way of living. It's very necessary for us, but when thinking about something that doesn't have a beginning or end, time becomes irrelevant. Thinking of events in a linear way is how we understand things, but it does not necessarily have to apply to everything.
ReplyDeleteA couple days ago I stumbled upon an article explaining how the universe was created. It then reminded me of greg's question, so I googled "what came before the universe" and the first article I found basically said that before our universe was the exact same universe, all over again but with time reversed. Not that I have any idea of what that means but here's the article: http://www.universetoday.com/13630/what-was-before-the-big-bang-an-identical-reversed-universe/
And here's another article about a new technology that can stop time:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-pentagon-backed-cloak-clock.html
What great thoughts!
ReplyDeleteWell Nik, I agree that we see time linearly, but also cyclically. We perceive our life as going on this one track of time, but sometimes I wonder if the seasons and annual traditions put some sort of time burden on us, because we feel like we are celebrating our birthday/4th of July/ Xmas so soon again. I thought how different would it be if there were no months and we had no annual traditions... if we just kept going forward and always did new things. Would we even like that?!
What is it about humans that had to take this abstract idea of time and put concrete numbers onto it?
rita i like the concept of having no "time markers" in place ... the birthdays and traditions etc.
ReplyDeletewe should talk about this in person when we are in some other dimension :)
It is very interesting to think of a "time" Before there was time. But in some ways we can't even apply our understanding of gravity, physics, sound, or light but cause these things are all dependent on and exist in the realm of time. Can our mind even understand this sort of thing?
ReplyDeleteDid anyone bring up dreams? I don't remember? Dreams are wired because you can sleep for hours and it will feel like a minute or you sleep for 20 minutes and it feel like a day. What ever it is that perceives time must get alterd when we sleep. Time is real but like all reality it seems to be formed in our minds.
I wish I had more TIME to read all these posts!
ReplyDeleteZING!
I like to think of time as the fourth dimension where a span of time is like a line of 3 dimensional dots. So our life time is like one huge fourth dimensional snake of our moments from birth to death where each cross section of the snake represents a 3-D moment in time. In that view, we have already died and we are just experiencing the next cross section of the snake as we move through it. Also in that view, our lives are kind of forever recorded. While we might think the past is gone and the future hasn't happened, it is all a part of the snake.
It is late though, and it is TIME for bed!
ZING!
Danny, your analogy makes me think of the aliens from Tralfamador in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. They can see in four dimensions, so when they look at a person, they see all that person's moments at once from past to future like a long range of mountains. Thus, when they see someone that's dead, it doesn't phase them much, as that's only one view of that person and the person is perfectly fine in many other views.
ReplyDeleteI remember talking to someone once and they said that they liked to view a person's journey through time as a shape of a spiral. It's essence is still cyclical, however you never end up right where you started because you are constantly evolving outwards. Then he went on to say that when our own spirals intersect with someone else's, those represent the times in our lived where they appear in our life plot lines. Sometimes our spirals only meet with another's once, other times they intersect over and over.
ReplyDeleteThen we went to the store and painted blue spirals up the corner of the burgandy walls in his room. Good experiential learning.
In regards to Curt's mentioning of dreams, it made me think that it is one medium where I can "experience" life events, but time seems to be irrelevant to the development of my dream and what is it I am seeking/running from/viewing/etc/. I can skip days, hours, locations, rooms, and social circles in a blink and my dream self doesn't seem to mind one bit. Funny, I can't even say I can switch locations in a split second because that in itself is giving way to a specific mode of marking time. Blinks are a natural measurement of something instantaneous. These "time markers" that we have referred to I cannot find in my dreams, instead I think we just follow a string of commonality that leads us through all these places of being (again- the rooms, groups of friends, countries...) in search of what the dream is trying to present us while we sleep. I enjoy experiencing a dimension that views time as such and I am grateful I get to be introduced to this alternative method each night.
good point bringing up dreams.
ReplyDeletethe only other thing that is consistent with time in dreams is that when being on mushrooms. if you've done them, you probably have said at least once during the trip "what time is it?? ah who cares, it doesnt matter anyway."
im not sure why time stops like that. its almost as if there is a specific line in our brain naturally taking care of that "time" issue, and when under the influences of dreaming/mushrooms, that line is numbed or something. a suspension of that. i think that suspension is what the "afterlife" feels like. things just ARE. change becomes something not related to time ... its just a nice way for us to be able to function here haha.