Sense of Time

Gary Sisco · January-18th-2009, 02:55 PM

I wonder often about how relative one's sense of time can be. If I think about my personal life over the past eight years, it doesn't seem long at all. Same with my dogs who will soon be five and I still think of them as puppies who arrived after our Ridgebacks died. If I think about the past eight years in terms of the Bushwits, it seems like forever and a day. If I think about Clinton years plus Bush years, seems like a lifetime. When I was in the service four years seemed like forever. Today a four-year hitch, I could do it standing on my head.

tippy · January-18th-2009, 03:16 PM

I think what happens is as you get older most of what happens in one’s personal life is a gazillion times repetition of something you’ve done or seen before and in the absence of distinguished moments, time all runs together and seems to pass more quickly without a-ha moments. I think it is the same principle that makes it harder to remember things. What would there be to make you remember a particular moment when you don’t have to think to perform the activity because it happens automatically. I think it is similar to the way musicians have music/technique automatically memorized in their muscles to elicit a flawless performance.

On the other hand, the noteworthiness (ability to distinguish) of disturbing political events make these eras seem lengthy because you can remember a plethora of moments from them. Perhaps how we experience time then is all related to what we can remember.

That’s very inarticulate but that’s the best I can do right now.

Cem · January-18th-2009, 03:32 PM

When you're, say, 8 years old, a 3 month summer vacation seems to last forever, because it's 3/96ths of your life experience. When you're 40, it's 3/480ths of your time spent here, so it seems to fly by.

tippy · January-18th-2009, 03:44 PM

That’s a good analogy I think for what I was trying to say.

Bill Barton · January-18th-2009, 03:48 PM

Hmmm... I know what you mean. Last night I was scanning back through the JC Speakeasy archives and checking out posts from the period when I made the move from Vermont to Washington State. Seems like yesterday in some ways and forever in others. Lotta water under the bridge as the ol' cliche goes. To trot out another cliche: the more things change the more they remain the same. The most active posters with rare exceptions are the same folks who are here now. And it's good to see the renowned Preacher back in the fold.

Jimmy Cantiello · January-18th-2009, 05:46 PM

The older I get the faster time seems to go. Now a year seems like a couple of months. Sometimes I find myself thinking where the hell did my life go? This year Joanne and I will be turning 60 years old! Christ, just yesterday I was a kid. Hey, Judy Collins, who knows where the time goes?

stonemonkts · January-18th-2009, 06:02 PM

I tired to find the passage online but couldn't, from Magic Mountain, which Mann titled "Excursis on the Sense of Time". If you have a copy of the book, check it out.

Basically says focused activities/endeavors make time feel slower, and idleness or a boring routine existence makes time seem to fly by (opposite of what most assume).

The effect is pronounced when you consider weeks and months instead of hours.

Gary Sisco · January-19th-2009, 11:24 AM

And there are periods in life -- for me, an example would be my hitch in the service -- that don't lose their significance despite each passing year making it a lesser percentage of my life. 4/55s of it, now. Same with my time spent rubber tramping and making music with my pals after the service and into my early 30s. One of my pals pointed out that because we only rarely had day jobs, and only briefly when we did, we spent more time together than many married couples do over the same period of time, or than friends do who see each other maybe on weekends or something like that. We were always together, gig or no gig. We were our own worlds.

Sergio Zamora · January-19th-2009, 11:40 AM

I heard him singing six months ain't no sentence
He said one year ain't no time
He said he had friends still in Angola
Serving from fourteen to ninety-nine

clinthopson · January-19th-2009, 11:49 AM

Time flies when you're having fun. All of my friends who are contemporaries, all comment on how quickly the calendar flips and the hours go by as we get older.

Since I retired, time seems to even go faster. Of course the other side is that some days I'm not sure what day it is since I don't have very many fixed meetings or appointments. Strange.

In a couple of weeks we are off for our annual sojourn on the beach in Zihuatanejo for 22 days. That time will just fly by even thou we don't do a damned thing.

Over the weekend, I heard from one of my beach buddies that they won't be coming to Z because of various health issues that go along with getting older, he's 81.

We have been friends for 27 years, have visited their place in Oshkosh and hosted them here. We sure will miss them.

OTOH, it sure seems like a long, long time between Nov. 5 and Jan. 20.

Monte Smith · January-19th-2009, 11:56 AM

I graduated high school twenty years ago and I can still have a good nightmare about not being able to get my locker open.

One thing that bugs me about "sense of time," though, is the dramatic cliche some profound types spout about time being an illusion. I have never understood what the proposition behind that one was. Like my buddy Ted. I said to Ted, "I hate the sort of people who claim that time is an illusion." He says, "Be prepared to hate me because I fully believe that time is an illusion." Knowing Ted, I knew that I didn't have time to listen to his explanation.

Gary Sisco · January-19th-2009, 12:08 PM

I think it's not an illusion to us, obviously, but, so far as we know today, it's a concept that has no place outside human conscience. We have the mixed blessing of knowing that death and physical decay are inescapable.

It is strange, though. Of course I know that time seems to pass faster as we age, but the strange thing to me is the multiple, relative senses of time we can simultaneously hold.

Canuck Don · January-19th-2009, 01:05 PM

I agree with posters who said as you age time goes faster..Just last week when I was visiting my 88 year old Ma.. I told her that now that I'm going on 65 how a year goes by so fast compared to when I was much younger..She said wait till I'm her age, that a year seems like a a few months, how fast it goes by. I then told her that me thinking about being 87 is a bit too far off that I just think in 5 's now..reaching 65 , then reaching 70 , then 75 and from then on just think in 1 year at a time.

Gary Sisco · January-19th-2009, 01:31 PM

I asked an old pal, 83 at the time, if a time ever came when it seemed like it was passing slower again. Maybe because of pain or whatever.

Very comfortingly, he replied "No."

Shit! :-)

steve(thelil) · January-19th-2009, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

.... but the strange thing to me is the multiple, relative senses of time we can simultaneously hold.

Agreed. Back when I was a Monday-Friday 9 to 5'er and the Summer and Winter Olympics were held the same year, I used to quip that it seemed like it took forever to get from Monday to Friday, but the fucking Olympics, which occurred only every 4 years were ALWAYS here.

patricia · January-19th-2009, 03:09 PM

I felt like a teenager for years and years.
Then, just a few weeks ago I realized that my oldest daughter whose face as a baby, like her youngers sister's I still can picture in my mind today, will be turning 30 on her next birthday. YIKES I thought, just for a second, but still I did think it, "Does that mean that I can't be thirty too? No fair."
I guess I have to be a grownup, if my daughters are responsible adults now, even my youngest.
So, yes, time does sometimes fly by without you even noticing. Stuff still happens but it just seems to get folded into the mix, instead of standing out, the way it seemed to when I was still a kid.

claude · January-19th-2009, 03:21 PM

Yeah, I don't know how I ended up being 43 while I still have the maturity level of a 13 year old (just ask my wife

).

patricia · January-19th-2009, 03:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by claude

Yeah, I don't know how I ended up being 43 while I still have the maturity level of a 13 year old (just ask my wife

).

Those closest to us are the most cruel..............................or honest.

Canuck Don · January-19th-2009, 04:24 PM

When you look in the mirror and see cheeks like Richard Nixon , you then know that gravity and time has just joined forces .
fortunatly ,, I don't have that problem

Gary Sisco · January-19th-2009, 04:28 PM

Me, neither, if you put it that way! :-)

It do get strange, though, these things. I'm 55 but don't feel any different than I did when young. Still feels like the same old Sisco. Different color hair and beard. That's all.

I did have a harsh realization some years back, however, when I realized I'd reach the point where I'm invisible to the young(er) hotties. :-(

"Dude. You're, like, old as my grandfather?"

A good thing I've always prefered women >40...

clinthopson · January-19th-2009, 04:32 PM

Considering my dissolute behavior over the years, the toll gravity takes and what your kids do to you, I'm in pretty good shape for an old fart.

Gary Sisco · January-19th-2009, 04:34 PM

And then there's seeing a lot of my old pals on the documentary "Bound To Lose" about the Holy Modal Rounders. Yep, getting older daily, those of us still alive, anyway. Strangely, again, however, even seeing everybody on the screen a few years ago, when the footage was shot. Yeah, everyone's looking older and at the same time, not. Just my old pals. The relativity of it all. I'm not sure I needed to see Weber or Tuli Kupferberg with chests exposed but I think I'd have said the same twenty or thirty years ago...

Canuck Don · January-19th-2009, 04:45 PM

I also see how fast time crept up on me when 40 year plus people start calling me Sir . and most of all when Feb. 14 , my Son will be 44 and month after that my other Son will be 42. Just seems like yesterday when they were little guys. and my Grandson turned 16 past Oct. Where the hell did the damn time go.

Monte Smith · January-19th-2009, 04:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by patricia

Stuff still happens but it just seems to get folded into the mix, instead of standing out, the way it seemed to when I was still a kid.

That's a true comment. When you are young, because you lack context and experience, everything is so new and can be so meaningful. A night can change your life. A record can change your life. It's the most common event in an adolescent existence, a record changing your life. These days if I buy a record, it'll be a good thing if I can listen attentively once or twice. And then it will go up on the shelf with the thousand other records I bought some time after the last time a record was able to change my life. Of course, I buy really geriatric records, like Karl Muck Conducts Wagner. But that's the way I've always been--oriented toward the antique. Who wants to be cool? You know what my 12 year old nephew says cool means? Constipated, Over-rated Obnoxious Loser. Ha!

tippy · January-19th-2009, 06:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

When you are young, because you lack context and experience, everything is so new and can be so meaningful.

That was what I was trying to say.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Monte Smith

A night can change your life. A record can change your life. It's the most common event in an adolescent existence, a record changing your life.

That’s what happened with In Rainbows for me and why I was so freakin’ excited.

When I was an adolescent, it was listening david Bowie, particularly Ziggy Stardust and his other 70s stuff.

I also miss having that moving movie experience I had when I was a kid. Movies used to knock me on my ass. Old Yeller knocked me on my ass. Taps knocked me on my ass. Baker’s Hawk knocked me on my ass. Pete’s dragon even knocked me on my ass. Hearing Helen Reddy sing “You are my candle on the water.” Scrooge scared the shit out of me when the skeleton came forth from the Ghost of the Future’s hood. I think I was 5 or 6 and I totally wasn’t expecting that. Now the only time I feel anything is when someone irritates me on Jazz Corner.

GoodSpeak · January-19th-2009, 08:01 PM

What gets me is at 54, my life seems to have just blown by me.

Yet retirement in 6 years [more or less] seems like an eternity.

Go figure.

Gary Sisco · January-20th-2009, 10:29 AM

I'm glad I retired during my youth when I could enjoy it.

With rare and always brief exceptions, I've done pretty much what I've wanted to do all long and still do, so I'm not looking forward to a retirement, which is a good thing because one isn't forthcoming for the likes of me. ;-) I still have things I want to do and if a time comes when I don't, it will be time to check out.

I saw a documentary about Blakey one time and in it, his daughter asks him what he would do when he was too old to play drums. Blakey said, "I'll die."

GoodSpeak · January-20th-2009, 10:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

I saw a documentary about Blakey one time and in it, his daughter asks him what he would do when he was too old to play drums. Blakey said, "I'll die."

I sure as hell hope that isn't what happens to me.

Gary Sisco · January-21st-2009, 09:34 AM

Why?

clinthopson · January-21st-2009, 01:15 PM

'Speak is the Elvin Jones of the Central Valley. Didn't you know?