Time: not enough and passing by.

Today’s ponder is all about time. The only commodity that money can’t buy. The moments when we think we have all the time in the world, versus the moments when there is never enough of it. As I’m getting older, and somewhat wiser, I’ve been thinking a lot about time and mortality. Don’t worry the blog isn’t a heavy one, more of a whimsical ramble.

I remember having a conversation with a colleague a while back. I said to him it’s funny how quickly the week days pass, before you know it it’s the weekend, for you to blink and then you’re back to Monday. We laughed, but he said something I found quite profound. I’ll get to that though.

Thinking back to when I was a child time seemed to be this endless thing that held up all the exciting things I wanted to do. Example one. On the weekend, waiting for a friend to arrive and it seemingly taking forever. Example two, a friend being round to play for an hour, but that hour feeling like it lasted so much longer than an hour today. It comes down to the perspective of time.

Going back to my colleague, he said something to the effect of “of course time goes faster now you’re older. It’s because it one hour of your life when you’re ten is a larger percentage from your overall lifetime, in comparison to an hour now that you’re older.”

Let me break it down.

One year has 8,760 hours.
At the age of ten, I’d lived 87,600 hours.

This means that one hour is equal to 0.001% of my total life as a ten-year-old.

That would make one week, which is 168hours, 0.2% of my ten-year life.

In turn making one year, 10%.

Now that I’m thirty-three, I’ve lived 289,080 hours.

One hour is now 0.0003% of my life.

Thinking about what one week, it is now 0.05% of my life so far.

With one year now being 3% of my life now.

See??

Maths. Numbers. Ouchie brain. Points still stand. My Maths teacher Mrs Armstrong would be so proud.

As we live longer, one hour, one week and one year etc, becomes less time relative to the longer we live. This means that as we get older, we will feel like we have less time!

I would like to point out, that had you said to me I’d be writing a blog with maths in it, I’d have laughed in your face. Maths is not a strong point of mine, and I kid you not, I had to speak this blog aloud to Ade, and use google to check the percentages before I posted, to make sure it all made sense. Not going to lie. I’m proud of me!!

What things make you feel that time slows down, and what things make you feel like time is against you?

Post a comment.

Anyway, back to time… the other thing I find fascinating about time, is how our perception of it can change. For example, when you have one minute left of doing a plank, versus one minute left to submit an assignment. You have one minute in both, and yet one (in my experience anyway) feels vastly different from the other. Or there is the losing track of time. Those occasions when you’re so immersed and focused in what you’re doing that time has passed so quickly you didn’t even realise. There is actually a name for this: Flow which comes from the Theory of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  The premise of his theory is the idea that the body and mind are so aligned to the thing you’re doing that you lose track of time or experience what can be described as ‘being in the zone’. The complete immersion in the task or activity.

It’s all fascinating! I’m sure you’ll be aware by now, I’m reading a lot of things and my brain is always whirring away. It’s about empowering myself and others. I’m looking into taking control of what I can, improving where I can, and sharing the experiences along the way! My goodness it’s a steep learning curve, and that in and of itself can be overwhelming, but I’m not letting that put me off.

As someone who regularly feels like there isn’t enough time, it’s been interesting to start to unpick why that feels that way.

Have you ever experienced ‘flow’?

What were you doing when you experienced it?

Let me know!

There you have it. Some peaceful ponderings around time. I have no doubt it will be a topic that returns in the future.

This has been a SmartPonders.
Thanks for reading!

Steph x