Timing
I was reading a friend's blog yesterday. She talks about time, and facilitating her class. What I found particularly interesting was an undercurrent I saw, of time as ally or foe. Brought up all sorts of philosophical thoughts for me.
Time Well Spent It is a familiar phrase with deep nuances most in our culture seem to miss.
I took my first leave in the navy after 9 months service. I used all three weeks I had accrued, and discovered it was a mistake. By the time it was over I was nearly as anxious to get back to work as I was to start the vacation. From that I learned it is best to ensure visits end before you want them to. The memories are better, you look forward to visiting again, are more welcome to return, and arrive back to your routine world before the enjoyment turns sour. I try to apply that lesson to many things in my life, not just vacation.
Time Spent Poorly Overstaying my leave was an example, and another common example in my world view is something I think of as dysfunctional martyrdom.
I got into the workaholic thing about nine years ago, for a year or two. I realized I was doing more stuff, accomplishing less, and making my general mood even darker. It wasn't impressing anyone either. I brought home a few more dollars, but didn't enjoy the cash or widgets.
Judging Time It's a quandary. Who judges "Time Well Spent?" Well, old dogs learn new tricks.
It's personal and subjective. I saw someone at work selling a pair of Seahawks tickets this week for $240, and thought what an incredible waste of time and money. Then I realized I spent $10 more for my pair of opera tickets and had another roaring good laugh at myself. I may not enjoy pro football any more than someone else enjoys theatre, but I now value them both.
Time Expansion/Contraction Remember how long time seemed to take as a child? What if it happened again?
The last five years of my life, time seems to have slowed down again. The previous fifteen or twenty years flashed by. What's the difference? Even as I write this, I'm pondering. Is it something to do with time well spent? I found theatre, and have immersed myself. Discovered a long-forgotten joy in life, and I am rarely, if ever, bored. Is feeling bored an indication of time ill spent? I don't mean feeling bored for ten minutes waiting on a tardy friend, but a feeling of continual and perpetual boredom. Is it time to seek out a shrink for some pills, or time to find your passion? For me it was the latter. Pills and doctors were out of the question thanks to a severely over-medicated mother. I suppose I should chat about her again before long.
Back to the point. I now keep my life quite full, and in the world. I was not a big tv addict, rather a bookworm, and reading hundreds of pages a day instead of watching tv still makes you a couch potato. You may prevent atrophy of the imagination, but you're still a freaking bump.
Like so many things I've discovered in my theatrical journey, I wasn't searching for a way to slow down the passage of time. In discovering and fully exploring the arts I simply found time was not passing me by any longer. Hope I don't sound boastful; I am trying to understand and promote the trend.
Time Well Spent Rachel's class expands and fills a 3 hour time slot with many more hours of life, but gets out early -- the opposite of my experience for an over-long vacation. Keeping my work day reasonable enables me to accomplish more tasks with better quality -- the opposite approach for most of my peers. I've experienced a reversal of time compression -- the opposite of what most people experience as they move further from childhood. There's some other thoughts in here, I just can't quite grasp them.
The childhood comment just gave me a mighty pause. Am I actually closer to my childhood? Is that a gift of following your heart?
Time Well Spent It is a familiar phrase with deep nuances most in our culture seem to miss.
I took my first leave in the navy after 9 months service. I used all three weeks I had accrued, and discovered it was a mistake. By the time it was over I was nearly as anxious to get back to work as I was to start the vacation. From that I learned it is best to ensure visits end before you want them to. The memories are better, you look forward to visiting again, are more welcome to return, and arrive back to your routine world before the enjoyment turns sour. I try to apply that lesson to many things in my life, not just vacation.
Time Spent Poorly Overstaying my leave was an example, and another common example in my world view is something I think of as dysfunctional martyrdom.
I got into the workaholic thing about nine years ago, for a year or two. I realized I was doing more stuff, accomplishing less, and making my general mood even darker. It wasn't impressing anyone either. I brought home a few more dollars, but didn't enjoy the cash or widgets.
Judging Time It's a quandary. Who judges "Time Well Spent?" Well, old dogs learn new tricks.
It's personal and subjective. I saw someone at work selling a pair of Seahawks tickets this week for $240, and thought what an incredible waste of time and money. Then I realized I spent $10 more for my pair of opera tickets and had another roaring good laugh at myself. I may not enjoy pro football any more than someone else enjoys theatre, but I now value them both.
Time Expansion/Contraction Remember how long time seemed to take as a child? What if it happened again?
The last five years of my life, time seems to have slowed down again. The previous fifteen or twenty years flashed by. What's the difference? Even as I write this, I'm pondering. Is it something to do with time well spent? I found theatre, and have immersed myself. Discovered a long-forgotten joy in life, and I am rarely, if ever, bored. Is feeling bored an indication of time ill spent? I don't mean feeling bored for ten minutes waiting on a tardy friend, but a feeling of continual and perpetual boredom. Is it time to seek out a shrink for some pills, or time to find your passion? For me it was the latter. Pills and doctors were out of the question thanks to a severely over-medicated mother. I suppose I should chat about her again before long.
Back to the point. I now keep my life quite full, and in the world. I was not a big tv addict, rather a bookworm, and reading hundreds of pages a day instead of watching tv still makes you a couch potato. You may prevent atrophy of the imagination, but you're still a freaking bump.
Like so many things I've discovered in my theatrical journey, I wasn't searching for a way to slow down the passage of time. In discovering and fully exploring the arts I simply found time was not passing me by any longer. Hope I don't sound boastful; I am trying to understand and promote the trend.
Time Well Spent Rachel's class expands and fills a 3 hour time slot with many more hours of life, but gets out early -- the opposite of my experience for an over-long vacation. Keeping my work day reasonable enables me to accomplish more tasks with better quality -- the opposite approach for most of my peers. I've experienced a reversal of time compression -- the opposite of what most people experience as they move further from childhood. There's some other thoughts in here, I just can't quite grasp them.
The childhood comment just gave me a mighty pause. Am I actually closer to my childhood? Is that a gift of following your heart?
4 Comments:
Nice thoughts. When I first started reading the phrases, I began playing the punster. Using the word "spent" I wondered how we came, as a culture to equate time with money where the only good way to spend time was to earn something in return. You've got to spend money to make it, right? Do you have to spend time to earn it? *smirk*
"Judging Time" - I imagined a courtroom with a jury deciding how well your time is spent. Hm, given the above, perhaps it's a jury of accountants?
To my mind, time doesn't really exist. It is simply a way to describe our passage through life. Therefore all of these phrases involve judgement/bias/commentary and they also judge how you feel you are at this point in your life as well as how you now feel about the past.
You know, I think maybe you do have to spend time to 'earn' it. It's an interesting thought, and is a nice way of expressing the experience of having more time when you keep your mind and body busy.
I believe time exists, though your feeling time doesn't exist expresses some of my feelings as well. A timeline is something we experience, and have great difficulty quantifying. What we understand as time is too vague to be defined in terms of existence we can grasp, yet it does not invalidate the existence of something we directly experience.
Then again maybe it does, because that is talking of time as the fourth dimension and what I was exploring does not fall into that definition of the word at all. I was going into my personal experience and perspective of time -- my passage through life.
Can time stand still? Have you ever had one of those moments where, for you, time stood still? If so, then what happened to everything else around you? Did everything else stand still as well?
I don't know about standing still, but time became a slow crawl when I had a motorcycle crash on the Freeway. I was bouncing down the pavement at around 60 mph watching the sparks come off the bike which was bouncing down the road in front of me. I remember thinking all sorts of stuff including well I'm not to messed up yet on nearly every bounce, and "Oh my poor bike!"
The witnesses kept commenting on how fast it all happened -- because they were so surprised I got up and walked to the shoulder, so I'm guessing nothing slowed except for my perception.
Well I did see the car which caused it slow for a bit, before he fled the scene. (Luckily for my insurance he had a change of heart.)
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