Time...

I have a strange, uncomfortable and often contradictory relationship with time. I don't keep a journal or an agenda, however my life is largely dictated by my watch. Like most people, I would describe myself as penny wise, but dollar friendly when it comes to time. What I mean is that I am liberal when it comes to large notions of days, months and years, setting dates, but being flexible with them, understanding that things come up that may affect these plans; while at the same time being rather obsessed with protecting my immediate time as a means of accomplishing my excessive goals and commitments in a given day. This is exemplified both in my studies and my avocation. The legal profession, which I am beginning to dip my toes into, is notoriously obsessed with segmenting time into tenths of an hour as a billing method, while at the same time constantly facing criticism, both internally and externally, for how long justice takes; and my athletic passions, endurance sports based around racing, are equally dependent on a close examination of the clock, with success and failure often determined by infinitesimally small fractions of time, but physical change coming after years of hard work and being largely unpredictable.
I also really enjoy reading books about time. While most of the books have dumbed the material down to a level that I can understand, I enjoy the completely useless and frustrating process of trying to wrap my mind around the philosophical questions that the subject raises, such as:
•What time actually is; •Whether time exists when nothing is changing; •What kinds of time travel are possible; •Why time has an arrow; •Whether the future and past are as real as the present; •How to analyze the metaphor of time’s flow; •Whether future time will be infinite; •Whether there was time before the Big Bang event; •Whether tensed or tenseless concepts are semantically basic; •What the proper formalism or logic is for capturing the special role that time plays in reasoning; •What neural mechanisms account for our experience of time; •Why there isn’t more than one dimension of time; and •Whether there is a timeless nature beyond spacetime. (see here)

On top of these brain candy queries, I also enjoy learning about the creative, scientific and theoretical approaches used to tackle these essentially unanswerable quandaries (lots of Q synonyms for questions). It fascinates me that people are willing, and able, to wrestle with questions of such an immense nature. I am also very grateful that some authors are willing and able to summarize the questions and proposed answers in a way that I can pretend to understand. I do realize that my understanding of what I read is either wrong, or the authors are summarizing the material inadequately, in an overly simplistic way, but I am okay with this, since, either way, it keeps me entertained and it's my time to waste.
There is also a large cultural component to time that has had a significant impact on my life. Time was a very loose concept in Nigeria when I was growing up. Because time and punctuality is so reliant on an effective and reliable system, such as working clocks, the poor infrastructure, lack of resources (such as working watches) and overall chaotic and unpredictable nature of life in a developing third world nation meant that time was very flexible, with events beginning when they started, as opposed to beginning religiously at an arbitrary preset time. Nigerians seemed to have an innate sense of when events were about to start and would all magically appear as the event took place. However, it is fair to question whether these two events were in fact coincidental, or whether the event started when everyone appeared, or if everyone appeared when the event started, a classic chicken and egg scenario!
This temporal habit of things happening very much in the moment often lead to cultural conflicts, since it irked the inflexible and challenged the traditionally future oriented western concepts of time. In the west, we are constantly thinking about the future, planning for it in the present, and arranging our lives with future events in mind. An interesting cultural concept that I once read about shows this different cultural interpretation of time quite well. To a certain African culture (I don't remember which one, or even of if they were in fact African), time is based off of an eternal present, with time and events described as either being: yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before the day before yesterday, or tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or the day after the day after tomorrow, meaning that to these people, it is always Wednesday! So here's an unsolicited travel tip, the need to understand and adapt to cultural notions of time is referred to as "temporal literacy" and therefore not understanding it is called "temporal illiteracy." Having an appreciation of local habits can save you some awkward and uncomfortable moments and will greatly reduce your stress level in a new setting, but old habits die hard and overcoming a deeply ingrained cultural construct like time is easier said than done!


Why do I bring this up? Well, other than trying to make myself appear more interesting and well rounded than I actually am, I just read a quote that relates to time that I liked (here): "immediacy is the currency of stupidity..." I think I may get this quote tattooed onto my fists, both for personal and external wisdom, as a reminder that a short term, reactionary approach, while often gratifying in the moment, is usually not the best option with the luxury of some afterthought. This can be simplified even further into the old mantra of "think...speak...", or "think...type" for the tweeters out there! ****Don't worry, I do have enough foresight to realize that sharing wisdom with my fists would count as a prime example of why I need this quote given my size and fighting ability.

Now for the punchline, the joke is on you for wasting your time reading this and also on me for typing it out. Add me to the long list of time thieves in your life!