Tag Archives: experience

The Van Gogh Exhibit

Here are some images and a short video from the Van Gogh Exhibit at the Vancouver Convention Centre:


This was truly a visual experience to be had. It begins with written information shared in socially distanced panels, then opens to the room in the images I shared above (there are 6 to scroll through on the Instagram post). If you get the opportunity to go, you will enjoy it.

Headspace

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day inside my own head. I don’t know if I’m the only one that experiences this sensation (or rather lack of sensation) or if it’s a quirk of the human condition we all experience? I was able to do my job, and I could interact with others, but I felt more like an observer than a participant. I wasn’t fully present.

This isn’t a headspace that I particularly enjoy. It is one where I don’t feel fully engaged in the world. I feel like a visitor in a foreign land, a stranger that vaguely understands my surroundings. I have to work to stay focused on a conversation because my thinking is too loud but not terribly interesting. I feel somewhat disengaged, not just from others but from myself.

Thankfully, the feeling is gone this morning. I don’t like to spend too much time ‘there’. It’s like the world outside my head is a movie that I must watch, but don’t really want to. Reading this now I feel like this should be titled head-case rather than headspace and wonder if someone reading this will recommend psychotherapy… but I also suspect that others will fully understand this experience. Is it really just me, or do others have these moments too?

I imagine for some people this can feel scary. For others, comfortable. For some they can put themselves here, for others they can’t leave. For me it is infrequent, it is not something I can talk my way out of, and it seldom lasts more than a day. It’s just a headspace that I sometimes get into… a mode of observing my own participation in the world around me, yet not feeling present.

The fluid nature of time

It will only take a minute, so indulge me and give this a try. Start a stop watch, close your eyes, relax, and without counting in your head, try to stop it after one minute.

How did you do?

We count seconds between lightning and thunder to see if a storm is getting closer, but when else do we keep track of seconds?

Sports teams hold time outs and the play gets stopped. Often in the final minutes and seconds of games like American Football and basketball, these stoppages can make a few seconds take an eternity to play out.

And on the other hand, we roll our eyes and get frustrated when a web page takes 3 seconds to load… forgetting the days of dial-up when a page with a simple image would take 15-45 seconds, and a large file might fail to load after several minutes.

Our relationship to time is changing. We used to hear and even feel the sound of a clock or a watch second-hand ticking. Now a second is an unfelt moment that sweeps by on a stop watch that also measures tenths and hundredths of a second just as easily as seconds.

How does the concept of time differ for people today, when they are never alone and bored? Do kids ever feel bored the way I did, when they are entertained and/or connected to other kids through their phones? On demand friends, on demand videos, on demand games must surely alter their perception of time. Does boredom come faster or slower to someone with such a different experience growing up?

At 52, the years seem to go quicker than they did when I was 26 or 13. Is that because a year of my life now is relatively less of my total life than when I was younger? Or are there external factors influencing my perception?

I’m reminded of this poem:

If you want to know the value of one year, just ask a student who failed a course. 

If you want to know the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby. 

If you want to know the value of one hour, ask the lovers waiting to meet. 

If you want to know the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed the bus. 

If you want to know the value of one second, ask the person who just escaped death in a car accident. 

And if you want to know the value of one-hundredth of a second, ask the athlete who won a silver medal in the Olympics. ~ Marc Levy

I understand that our perception of time differs due to our experience. An hour of boredom feels like it lasts considerably longer than an hour socializing with friends. But beyond that does it feel to you, like it does to me, that time moves much more quickly now?