Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
As we return to work after the leisurely three-day Labor Day weekend, I wanted to write something about time.
Then, I realized I already had. The column below appeared in the Milton Standard-Journal on October 16, 1998.
The Physics of Time
As
anyone who has ever waited in a line at Wal-Mart knows, time is flexible.
From moment to moment it changes, expanding or shrinking according to
the situation.
With
this in mind, I did some experimenting this past week and discovered some
basic principles of time:
1. Time is indirectly proportional to the amount of enjoyment you get from an activity. This means, for example, that the first hour of work on Monday is approximately three times the length of the last hour of leisure time on Sunday.
2. Time is indirectly proportional to the amount of work you need to do. This means that, on afternoons when you have a stack of items in your Inbox, the time will shrink so that you barely get through half of it. On afternoons when your Inbox is empty, time will elongate, allowing you plenty of time to go through all those old files in your desk but not, ironically, time to check your e-mail (see rule number 1).
3. Time moves more slowly when you don't wear a watch. Many Westerners get nervous when they're not wearing a time piece. They fear that they will "lose track" of time. The truth is that time can not be "lost." It's always there. When you don't wear a watch, rather than being less attuned to time, you are more attuned to it. And its passing tends to bother you less.
4. Time may also move in mysterious ways. It's easy to believe in Murphy's Law, that everything that can go wrong will. And yet, sometimes things go so right you want to pinch yourself. Some days the sky is clear, the sunshine bright, and the day stretches on forever. It's easy, during our weekly toil, to forget this.
5. Time is a construction. We may think that time is a natural part of the earth, but it is really a human construction. It's our human tendency to divide and organize things that created the construction of time.
There's time enough for all the good things in life. And the bad things don't last forever.
As Janis Joplin once said, "Tomorrow never comes, man. It's all one day."
Moral:
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
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