Hm, well, it's finally hit me. That point where I just can't get to sleep. It took just a week. Wow. Usually it takes longer.
I'm sure there are plenty of factors I could blame for why I can't get to sleep. Some of them may even be valid. But why blame something that can be a blessing.
I mean, with all this time I'm going to be spending awake instead of sleeping, I can get so much done. Like this blog post for example.
And while I'm getting things done, did I mention that it's been a week since graduation. Amazing, huh? It feels like forever since I've been in school. I really want to know why the mind plays such tricks with time. It's not nice. Not nice at all.
Well, hopefully all of you are asleep in your beds at this point. If not, why?!
Oh, are you sharing this nocturnal wonderland with me?
Cool.
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2 comments:
Is it the mind playing tricks with time? I think not...
It's more our flawed perception of time. Think of all our senses: they all work on CHANGE. We don't feel "90 degrees," we feel hot, which means that the temperature is MORE. We don't sense "loud," we feel MORE pressure. True there are degenerate cases for our senses.
Lets look at one. Say everything in your field of view (everything you can possibly see) is the same shade of white, with the same brightness (same amount of reflected light). You still percieve the white yes, but its because of (yes I'm using a bit of your quote) the CHANGE felt by photoreceptors in your eye.
Lets look at a more degenerate case. Take the same room, only make it absolutely black: no photons whatsoever (or at most a trivial amount). Can you SEE the black? Now we're out of the concrete and into abstract... it all depends on whether you believe that you see the DARKNESS, or if the darkness comes from a lack of SEEING.
How about imagination? Close your eyes, and I'm sure you'll see something (in a dark room, so that no light is getting into your eyes). Is what you see any less "there?" If theres no light, how then do you see it?
The mind fills in the blanks when theres no change. The mind makes the change so that we can understand it. And now we're back at time...
When I say "10 seconds," everyone knows what that MEANS -- everyone can count off a (relatively) accurate 10 second, and everyone can describe what happened during those 10 seconds.
But what about 10 minutes? It gets harder. 10 hours? Harder still. 10 days? Almost impossible. It all has to do with largeness.
We cannot understand the terribly small nor the massively big. And for us, anything more than a few hours (maybe a day at most) is simply too much time for us to keep a hold on. Thats why the past seems to be at times so long ago, and at times so soon ago -- because we can't make heads nor tails of the size of the time. Just like when you're looking over a huge field, 1 mile doesn't seem much different from 2 miles because they're both so BIG.
But wait, theres more!
Time seems to "fly" so quickly because its one thing we have no natural measureing device for. I can measure distance, volume, and all kinds of things just with my body (thats 12 feet away... < /pun> ). But not time: we don't have any kind of internal chronometers.
Thats why time seems to go so slowly when we use external chronometers: when we're looking at a clock, or listening to the rhymic tic-toc of a clock or metranome. And theres change again: we know time as the difference between a tic and a toc. And the instant that time is past us, we lose our perception of it. Ironic that we can't know a "moment," and yet a moment is all we can really percieve.
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Thats my large comment for the day.
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The word of the day is dvqlb.
To quote a Mexican friend, "DAMN!!!"
That's some good stuff. You always have a way of expressing the simply truths of life that we never see in eloquent language. Thanks for the highlight.
And speaking of time flying, today has gone by in a flash. It's 3:40 already! And I got up at 9:30! What's up with that!?
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