Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Time is a relative concept.

There's no possible way to survive the spring forward time change unscathed. It doesn't matter if you manage to get ten hours of sleep when it occurs, which I did. Losing an hour of your life is surprisingly hard to handle.

Which is kind of funny when you think about time in general, right? I mean, we sit around spending hours doing pointless things. Sometimes, we'll spend an hour at Starbucks with our friend catching up over coffee. We'll give an hour to a preacher or other religious official, whether we listen to the sermon or not. There's always an hour to drop on Pinterest or Tumblr or Facebook. But when it comes time to buckle down and study, I've somehow run out of hours to spend.

I've heard it said that "time flies when you're having fun," but I think it's really a lot more simple than that. When we don't look at a clock, or don't pay attention to time, it ceases to matter. Just like when we sleep, we lose all sense of how long we're asleep for. Time is a concept that humans created, and when humans forget about it, time loses it's power.

We've got clocks everywhere: on our phones, on our wrists, on the wall of nearly every room we enter. I know plenty of people who claim that "it's annoying" when a room doesn't have a clock, even if they've got one or two in their possession. We're obsessed with this thing we've created, teaching our children from young ages that it's important to understand it, when ultimately, there's about a thousand other things that matter more.

Once you learn how to tell time, you fall victim to it, letting it encompass your life forever. You're late, you're early, you're right on time. You can't have coffee with your friends between work and class because it takes you too long to walk from Point A to Point B. Sometimes, I wonder what our world would be like if we had never established time as a whole. The sun would still rise in the east, wouldn't it? I guess it's just impossible for the world to run smoothly without some kind of concept to control us, to keep us all moving together, just like clockwork.

No comments:

Post a Comment