My perception of time

[xiphias]

Lis has been after me to post about this, about a conversation we had about a week and a half ago.

I made the comment, which she felt was interesting, that, as far as time goes, I can understand and feel only two measures of time: right now, and eternity. And I can't really understand or feel anything in between.

This makes it hard for me to plan things, since neither of those time periods is actually particularly conducive to daily life.

But, well, I can think of things as "past", and "future," and I can use a clock and a calendar to determine "fifteen minutes", "an hour", "a week", and "a year", but I have no instinctive understanding of those latter time periods. To me, ten years ago and last week feel about the same, and dinner and the grave feel approximately the same distance in the future.

This makes planning, and living, rather difficult.

Anyway, Lis thought that was interesting, and asked me to blog it. Some time in the past, which she states was a week and a half ago, but which I recall as "before now."

Comments

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

I've referred to myself as temporally challenged for years. Despite going through time management classes and such, I'm pretty bad with time myself. Really bugs the wife when I reply to something she's said or brought up, a week or two later. Sometimes stuff just bubbles up like that.

Do you ever visualize time/number lines? I see a clock, with twelve hours and then going up vertical, 13-100, then 101 on to the left, up to 1000 and then up to the left, at a 45° angle. No idea why I see it like that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You might want to check out _The Heart of the Mind_ by Steve and Connie Andreas--it's got a chapter or two about people getting a more useful understanding of time by giving themselves better organized ways of imagining time.

Does your current present/eternity set-up have advantages?

[mswae.livejournal.com]

My friend's mom is notorious for attributing everything in the past to "the other day". This can mean anything from "five minutes ago" to "before you were born". So I don't think it's that unheard of. I'm not sure she's the world's greatest planner either, but she's definitely famous for not being able to place things relatively in the past.

[cheshyre]

The problem as I see it is more about the future than past.
Planning is pointless from the point of view of "always-now"
Planning is pointless from the point of view of eternity.

Also, the eternal timescale leads to existential angst -- what point is there in anything if in a few millenia it will make no difference?

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Just remember the iceball. In 20,000 years, it's all going to be covered by ice, so yeah, what does it matter?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Actually, for me, it's the heat-death of the universe.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Ah, you like vodka.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Naw -- I just can't imagine anything significantly more horrific than the notion of an unbounded universe at a consistent 4 degrees kelvin.

[pogodragon.livejournal.com]

jeremy_m refers to pretty much anything in the past as 'when I was a tiny child', which translates to 'more than about a week ago'. Anything in the future (especially if it's worrying or distressing him - things like routine eye appointments f'r instance) are percieved as the end of all things and it's not possible to plan beyond them. The phrase 'after your [insert current scary pre-occupation]...' has an entirely null value to him.

No content, but I feel your (or Lis's) pain.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

This is why I can't get on without my auxilliary brain, aka the day planner. It's pocket-sized so I can always have it with me and I check it all the time to make sure I haven't forgotten what I noted in it. I would never remember any appointments or other things I'm supposed to be doing without it, or at least I wouldn't remember them as happening on the correct day.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I think my daughter has something of the same tendency. For quite a long time, beyond the time when most of her classmates had learned to use time descriptors "correctly", everything was either "today" or "the other day". "The other day" could be any time from before she was born ("the other day when [elder brother] was in your tummy...") to years in the future ("the other day when I can be a dance teacher...") This could make her conversation quite difficult to follow at times, but it was also rather charming. She uses time words conventionally now, but I still sometimes get the impression that they don't come naturally to her. She shows much less interest in things like "how many days till Christmas", "how many days till my birthday" than I remember her brothers doing.

[kelfstein.livejournal.com]

Time is an interesting concept that took over mankind, sort of sucks, I am now a slave to it.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

Argh!

Couldn't you have told me that five years ago?

Kiralee

[temima.livejournal.com]

That sounds like very much how I conceive of time. There is a side order of 'parallel time', the somedays and the reimagining of past events.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This explains much.
(Said completely nonsnarkily)