I'm starting to think that I'm operating outside of time. I seriously no longer have any concept of time. Days of the week mean next to nothing to me, which tends to be a problem when I try to go somewhere only to realize that it's actually Saturday and everyone else is out and about too. For over two years I had nothing that even came close to resembling a schedule. I woke up when I was no longer tired and there were several times where I found myself awake for 24-48 hours in a stretch. The whole thing has left my internal clock flashing 12:00 over and over again. And to make things even more confusing I've started a job where my schedule feels like the opposite of everyone else. I'm going into the office hours before the sun will rise. It's before the rooster would think about waking up. Add to that working those same hours on weekends means that Friday is my Monday. So I typically have no idea when I am.
It seems that a lot of people are just killing time. The problem with that is they're killing time while looking forward to nothing. Sure they may be waiting for the weekend, but how different are the weekends from the weekdays? When you're waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a doctor's waiting room you're looking for ways to kill time because something is about to happen, you just have excess time on your hands. If you're killing time every day then maybe it's a sign that you need something to do. What's the point of always watching the clock while you're at work just so you can go home and watch the clock until it's time to go to bed so you can do it all over again?
Which makes me wonder if time isn't running in a line at all. What if it's all sort of circling back on itself over and over again? I mean if we can remember the past then how come we can't remember the future? If you believe in the idea that all time is always happening then it would stand to reason that events that haven't happened in our perception should be remembered as well as those that have already happened. Is that what Deja vu is? Just a brief glimpse into something that's already happened and we're remembering it somehow? If time is always happening then it would be nice if we could get some insight to things up the road so we can make some changes. Kind of like holding your finger on a page while reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You choose to go right. You were eaten by a bear. With that knowledge you flip back and decide to go left instead.
I guess the trick to time is not thinking of it as something that you need to kill in order to get to the next thing. They say time flies when you're having fun and that's because you're not thinking about how much time is going by, but instead of thinking about the fun itself. So the moment you start seeing time as something that has to be counted you've already partially defeated the purpose.
Often I've wondered how people spend their time. When I was younger I thought for sure I'd be given some kind of knowledge of what to do with myself when I was older. Apparently I never got that memo. So I'm always asking people what they do with their time. Turns out my time spent isn't all that much different from most people. Even when someone has kids there's just a lot of almost empty calories as far as time spent is concerned. Watching television. Surfing the internet. Playing games. Reading books. Chores. Other various hobbies. I'm not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but all can be treated as things done just to get through a few hours before something else happens.
We've created all these gadgets to save time. All these processes to be more efficient. We've done all this and yet we're still always busy and it feels like there's less time than before. So is there really less time or are we just terrible in how we spend it? It makes me wonder what we'd do with ourselves if we didn't have to do certain things. If we didn't have to eat what would we do with the time we'd save by not having to gather food or money to buy food? No matter how advanced we think we are, there are always going to be the basics of survival that take up a majority of our time. We'd like to believe that we're above the lion, who spends its days looking to eat. We're not that far ahead of them when instead of hiding in the grass waiting for a slow gazelle we're stalking through some office waiting for our paycheck so we can buy a steak.
Maybe some day we will evolve beyond what we are now and we'll look back at all of this with different eyes. It makes me think of the closing lyrics for an old song.
"Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew. Now man's reign is through, but through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight. So very far away. Maybe it's only yesterday"
