Despite that time is measured from nano seconds to light years, neither one of these measurements is comprehensible for most human beings.
The saying that a couple of seconds can make a difference is something we can grasp.
After all, we drive cars at speeds where we only have seconds to react, but our perception of time changes when we are sad or in pain, then time seems to drag, but when we are happy time flies by.
This is opposite to what we remember because we can remember and talk for years after about the good time we had, but pain and sadness usually become less and less talked about after a certain amount of time.
People who live a very regulated or routine life with hardly any variance in their existence often say life went by so fast, all of a sudden we are grandparents. Where did the time go? I think that time was lost in monotony. Looking back at a life guided by routine and the clock, must be like looking back at an endless straight road with no curves or hills or fences on each side.
I don’t think life was meant to be that way. The industrial revolution played a big role in creating this way of life.
As soon as factories and mass production came into being the factory whistle was there.
Time was now punctuated by whistle blows. Arrive and leave your station only when the whistle blows. Our schools still operate under the same system, it seems a copy of the factory example.
Be at the school at eight thirty when the bell rings and learn English until fifteen minutes after nine, then learn physics until the bell rings for intermission at 10 o’clock and so on.
It definitely is a set-up for clock watching until retirement, unless one wins the big lottery. What I also often have heard is “the older I get the faster time flies.”
That seems to be true, so I wondered what the reason for that is. I think the reason for that is we recognize that a lot of things have the same content but have a different wrapping or are a repeat of what has been seen many times before.
When something has been seen many times the brain puts it in a certain category and it becomes an item in a big heap that is soon forgotten as it disappears in the “seen or experienced that before” file.
It is logical that a person 80 years old has seen more governments topple, has seen or heard of more people being injured or die in all kinds of accidents, or had to deal with more friends and family that passed away than a 30-year-old person.
It is logical that when things don’t register in the memory part of a brain as much as when we experience something new or different, the time is perceived to go faster or slower.
Since, unfortunately, many people start withdrawing from
life as they get older, all of a sudden they are old but don’t know where the time went.
I have come to the conclusion that the measurement of time is of little value unless value is put in the measured time.
In other words what one gets out of it depends on what one puts into it.
Bert de Vink’s a long-time Quesnel resident who wrote for the Cariboo Observer from the mid 80’s to the late 90’s. The Observer is pleased de Vink once again decided to put pen to paper.