Tag Archives: time

Time warp

Have a look at this infographic:

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years, and disappeared in a mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Early hominids, the ancestors of early man only showed up 10 million years ago. If you were to draw a timeline from the first dinosaur to today, then the last surviving dinosaurs are closer in time to humans than they are to the first dinosaurs.

I don’t know why I grew up assuming that humans and dinosaurs co-existed long ago, but give me a break… I was only 55-60 million years off! Maybe it was drawings of humans and wooly mammoths? Maybe it was cartoons? But it’s a real time warp when you think about how long dinosaurs ruled the earth, and how short of a time humans have existed.

It’s even weirder to think of the time it took from the first steam engine to the time when our industrial lives started to threaten the well-being of our planet. Is this what intelligence life forms do? We’ve just been looking at time in millions of years, but the first steam engine was built just over 400 years ago.

Humans have been on this planet for such a short time, yet we place so much attention on ourselves and our significance, as conscious beings. This one species, on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, at an insignificant time in the existence of the universe.

It’s time we got over ourselves.

Junk vs treasure

As we pack up our main floor for our renovation, I’m coming across souvenirs and trinkets from vacations and travels. Some of them have been hidden in drawers and cabinets unseen for years. Do we keep it or throw it away? Does it get put in a box only to be seen again when we unpack after the renovation, and then tuck it in a drawer not to be seen again until we move? Or do we let go of it now?

The saying goes ‘One man’s junk is another man’s treasure’ but when looking at your own stuff, sometimes it is simultaneously both. Do we need 3 sizes of wine glass sets for more than 6 people each? Do we also need the fun set of patterned wine glasses, and the plastic ones for outside? No, we don’t need them. But will we throw or give any away, or will we keep them? Are they worth holding on to?

I suspect we will be keeping a lot more junk than we should. We’ll see value, be it functional or sentimental, and we’ll hold on to too much stuff. I think we would get rid of a lot more items if we had a critical friend helping us and just asking, “Do you really need to keep that?” In most cases the answer would or should be ‘No’, but for my wife and I, many of these things will end up in a box and back into a drawer or cabinet. Hopefully we’ll be a bit more hesitant to keep some of our boxed junk when it’s time to unpack, and these unnecessary items will be given away to find homes in someone else’s house.

But I’m sure of one thing, we are going to end up keeping far more than we should… Maybe not truly a treasure, but not quite considered junk (yet).

Internal clock

When I go to bed, I can set an alarm and the tell myself to wake up before it goes off. I’ll wake up before the alarm goes at an average better than 9 times out of 10. It doesn’t work when I’m napping. It does t work if I’ve had a few drinks. But on a typical morning, I’ll wake up anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 minutes before my alarm.

However, if I wake up and check the time an hour or more before my alarm, what I can’t do is change the time I plan to wake up. It’s like the original time is locked in, and in a half-sleeping state, I lose the ability to change that time.

This morning I woke up an hour and 25 minutes before my alarm and decided, I’ll get up 30 minutes earlier. Closed my eyes and even dreamt about waking up earlier. Then my eyes popped open 2 minutes before the original time I had planned to get up, allowing me to shut off my alarm before my wife had to hear it. No extra 30 minutes for me this morning.

Despite my inability to change the set time during the night, I’m always puzzled and amazed at how I’m able set my internal clock before going to sleep. How does my body/mind know what time it is? If I woke up at exactly the same time every day, I think this would be more understandable. But I vary my wake up time by over an hour on weekdays and wake up another hour plus later on weekends. And I haven’t heard my alarm in over 2 weeks.

With respect to how we’ve evolved, the inventions clocks is such a new novelty, that there is no way it was a necessarily learned behaviour. Being sensitive to light outside our eyelids is a natural cue to let us know it’s time to get up. But the difference between waking up at 4:45 and 5:30, in total darkness, isn’t something our bodies should just know and be able to do.

How does our body know the difference? How are we able to control an internal clock? And how do we keep track of this while we are asleep, unconscious?

We live in a time warp

When you are 10, 5 years is half a lifetime. 10 years is half your life at 20, and 20 years is half your life at 40.

By the time you hit 40, your first 20 years are a distant memory, and you remember choice moments, but you don’t remember those years like when you were younger. The distance in time causes you to lose your ability to hold on to old memories. You can’t hold an ever accumulating amount of memories, and so some fade away. So time stretches the past into a distance too far to see everything.

Meanwhile, 1 year at 10 used to be 1/10 of your life. A year at 20 is 1/20th of your life and a year at 40 is 1/40th of your life. Each year, the lengths of a year as compared to the rest of your life diminishes. So time also shrinks the future while it stretches the past. We live in a time warp, and time goes by faster every day.

Sometimes it’s good to reflect on this, if only just to appreciate the fleeting moments in a day, and know that unless we appreciate the time we have, we can only appreciate the memories that we know will fade away.

Time keeps ticking

It’s wonderful when you get to spend a weekend with family. I enjoy my work, but I have to say that I’d love a 4-day week with 3-day weekends. Time seems to be going by so quickly.

As I get older, I seem to be more and more fascinated by time… and the time we have with our family of different generations.

Here is a video to help you really think about this.

Distances by time

So TikTok has taught me something about travel in Canada. Apparently we are one of the only places in the world that describe distance using time. How far is Nelson BC from the Vancouver Lower Mainland? About 8 hours. Kelowna? 4 hours. Coquitlam to downtown? 40 minutes unless it’s rush hour, then it’s over an hour. My commute to work? 6-8 minutes depending on my timing through one annoying traffic light.

This will change. Many more countries will follow our lead. Not because Canada will have some kind of significant influence, but because of Google and Waze. As more and more people plug their destinations into GPS, they will start to think more like we do. They will come around to how much more sense this makes rather than discussing distances according to kilometres or miles.

We are just ahead of our time. 🤣

Meh

It’s 10:30pm and I feel like I’ve wasted most of the day. I did help my wife with some garage clean-up but we didn’t spend that long on it. I did have a wonderful dinner with my daughter, but then I came home and fell asleep on the couch. I started writing this and realized that I forgot to hit publish on yesterday’s post. I back dated it, hit ‘Publish’, and now I’m writing this before doing a meditation and a guilt-ridden workout, having not worked out yesterday.

This is the challenge of not having a routine. This is what scares me about the idea of retirement. I often need a schedule to be and feel productive. I can waste away time like it’s nothing and end up feeling like a day has completely escaped me. I didn’t even listen to much of my audiobook that I’m thoroughly enjoying. I didn’t take time to do archery, which I just mentioned enjoying yesterday (although I only published it tonight).

This is not me at my best. I’ve got to be present rather than simply let the present become the past without even realizing it. I’ve got to get active early in the day and set a personal goal or two to accomplish. It can be as simple as listening to my book, or writing this before 10:30pm… it’s not about needing to do anything great, it’s just about make moments of ‘meh’ into moments I value and appreciate. It’s interesting that my only two mentionable moments from today were with my family and my meh moments where when I was alone. I usually enjoy times of solitude, but now it’s obvious to me that I have to be more present and focused about how I spend my alone time, rather than wasting it away.

Beyond space and time

Part 1 – Time travel

When people imagine time travel, they often don’t realize that they are also talking about space travel as well.

How Fast Is the Earth Rotating on Its Axis?

The Earth rotates on its axis once each day. Because the circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles, a spot on the equator rotates at approximately 1,037.5646 miles per hour (1,037.5646 times 24 equals 24,901.55), or 1,669.8 km/h.

At the North Pole (90 degrees north) and South Pole (90 degrees south), the speed is effectively zero because that spot rotates once in 24 hours, at a very, very slow speed. (Source)

In addition to this rotation, the earth is hurling around the sun at 30km (19 miles) per second! And, our sun isn’t stationary in the galaxy, it travels 792,000 km (483,000 miles) per hour (and still takes 230 million years to complete a rotation).

These numbers are mind boggling. Now, going back to the idea of a time machine, if I was able to go back in time to only 5 years ago, the earth that existed back then was millions of kilometres away from where the earth is now. I’d have to travel through time and space.

Part 2 – The light of the stars

When we look at the stars, we only see their history. The closest star, our sun, is not where we see it, it is where the sun was 8 minutes ago, because that’s how long it took the light to reach us. For stars that are light years away, they could already have gone super nova, and wiped out their solar system, and generations later our ancestors will still see that star, not knowing it no longer exists. We are literally looking back in time when we look out into space.

Part 3 – the edge of the universe

A concept I can’t wrap my head around is what’s beyond the edge of the universe? And if you have an answer for me, what’s beyond that? This to me is the definition of infinite… the idea that no matter how far away something is, there has to be something still farther away.

If you had a string that was infinitely long and you cut it in half, you’d have two strings that are infinitely long. Think about that for a while… then try to forget it. 😜

Why should we believe that our universe is the only universe? Could there be multiple universes in the empty void beyond our own? Could our entire universe be an atom in a massive other universe? What secrets do the edge of our universe hold? We will never know because it takes too much time for the light way out there to reach us.

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These are 3 ideas about space and time that peak my curiosity and make me marvel at life, the universe, and everything… while we hurl through space on an insignificant rock around an insignificant sun, in an insignificant galaxy… thinking thoughts that significantly challenge my intellectual understanding.

Fast days

Yesterday went by ridiculously fast. I said to my secretaries at 10:20am, “I need a time machine to go back an hour and get all the things done that I thought I’d get done by now.” One of them said, “I think there’s a song about that, 🎵’If I could turn back time’🎶”.

Some days are like that, they zip by and even when you are working diligently, time escape you. After lunch was the same, except more interrupted. The interruptions and the follow up on them are expected in a job like mine. Other people’s priorities can become mine… I’m there to support my staff and students. But some days, like yesterday, happen so quickly that they seem to race by as if someone pressed and held the fast forward button.

I came home and after dinner I did a couple things I had planned to do in the morning. One job was about 5 minutes, the other about 30. Neither were very hard. Neither could get done during the day. The scary thing is that every June gets like this… but it’s not June yet and I’m already feeling the year-end crunch.

I might not be able to turn back time, but I wouldn’t mind if it slowing down just a bit!

Longer days

Last night it was still bright out at 8pm. This morning I could see the blue light of the morning, rather than complete darkness, at 5:15am. This is such a welcome shift from the winter gloom that darkens the skies at 4:30pm and doesn’t brighten them again until after 7am. It might still be spring but the feeling of summer is here.

I enjoy waking up to a room lit by natural light. It feels so much more effortless to begin my day. I find myself more eager to get the day started, and find that my eyes widen to take in the light in a way that darkness doesn’t invite.

It’s hard to believe it is almost the end of April. I feel like the year has simultaneously been long and drawn out, while it has also disappeared in the blink of an eye. It has felt long with restrictions being something always on my mind, both at work and in my personal life. Meanwhile, every year seems to go faster, and time slips by without the realization that the days and months are gone.

As the days get longer, I’m left wondering how the years seem shorter? Perhaps it’s because to a 10 year old, 5 years is half a lifetime, and to a 53 year old 5 years isn’t even a 10th of my life. Does time go by faster simply because relative to my age, any significant unit of time represents less of my total life?

Whether that’s the case or not, I’m reminded to value the time I’ve got. To cherish the family and friends I have, and to seize the enjoy the moments that make up my day… starting with the appreciation of natural light helping me to start my day, and reminding me that summer will be here in no time at all.