I bought myself a new watch today. Nothing particularly exotic, and certainly not expensive, but I liked the look of it, so I decided to treat myself. I can't remember exactly when I was given my first watch, but I was definitely under 10, and, for the next forty years, I wore one for the vast majority of my waking hours. Over the past five years or so, though, I seem to have gone from one extreme to the other, rarely, if ever, having a watch on my wrist. Why that should be is an interesting question. Could it be, perhaps, that I've felt the 'chariot of time' pursuing me, and don't want to be reminded of how little of it, in absolute terms, I have left? Or is that just me being ludicrously pretentious, aggrandising a mundane personal choice into a psychological verity?
Time, in general, is a slippery concept, with varying opinions on whether it has any real existence, or is merely a mental construct, an illusion manufactured by our brains to try to make sense of our perception of the inescapable 'now' which we inhabit. One of my favourite books, Ada, by Nabokov, has a longish section where the author, through one of his main characters, a psychiatrist/philosopher, speculates about the nature of time. It's a challenging, but interesting read. I'm no metaphysician, but, for what it's worth, I lean toward the view that time comes from within rather than without. But, of course, I could very easily be wrong!
Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B
I got my first watch about the same time you did - pre-ten years old. I wore one almost all the time (I remember my first waterproof one so I could wear it in the pool). For years and years, time was a commodity for me: my salary was paid for by ads, each 15, 30 or 60 seconds long, and making sure they aired to the second they were scheduled was very important. When I left work in commercial television, I quit wearing a watch. If I really need to know what time it is, I can usually just look around me, and there will be a clock somewhere.
ReplyDeleteI agree that time is a slippery concept. Based in many ways on sound science, we certainly use it in interesting ways. Our entire life is governed, more than probably anything, by time, based on a 24 hour day, a 7 day week, a 52 week year. Interesting.
Peace <3
Jay
Hello Jay
DeleteMy job has a heavy involvement with time, I suppose, with things needing, as far as practicable, to happen at specific times, so maybe that's another reason I gave up wearing a watch, the fact that I spend so much of my working life 'clock-watching'.
The clock and calendar 'times' we live by are connected to the physical world, in the sense that they're based on the earth's rotation and orbit around the sun, but, to a degree, they're still arbitrary, still a construct, a coincidental artifact of the earth rotating roughly every 24 hours in this particular epoch - the rotation of the earth was more rapid in the planet's early history, so the day could have been 16 hours, or whatever, if there had been sentient beings around at that time. Whether 'time' exists as an independent physical attribute of the universe, though, I don't know, but I have my doubts.
Love & best wishes
Sammy B