Tag Archives: time

Ripples over time

Facebook reminded me that I just recently passed 14 years since moving from teaching to administration. My FB memory led me to reread this post, Ripples and Tidal Waves, which I wrote 2 weeks after my promotion. I had so many things that came together at that time, which led to me being a presenter at Alan November’s conference a couple years running. I was even toying with the idea to go and work for Alan. How different my life would be now if that was a wave I chose to ride!

Looking back to that point, I had no idea what was in store for me. Living in China for 2 years? Not even a consideration back then, but I did just that a year and a half later. Co-founding a public, inquiry based school? Not on the radar. The only thing I can say that was expected is that I’d still be blogging all these years later.

We never know how circumstances and decisions will end up rippling and leading us to different opportunities and challenges, but we are fortunate when we can look back to a point in our careers 14 years ago and think, “This has been a great journey I’ve been on!” From here, I have less than 1/2 this time until I retire, and so I’m left wondering what ripples lie before me? Retirement for me will not mean gardening or golfing, and I can’t sit still for too long, so in the next few years I need to look for the ripples that come my way… or I need to make them.

Tiny little moments

Some days slip bye and when you look back, it’s hard to say what you did to fill them. On those days I try to think of small yet special moments:

A laugh with colleagues.

A good conversation.

A delicious snack.

A kind gesture.

A selfish moment.

A selfless moment.

A single accomplishment.

It doesn’t have to be a big thing, it just has to be something that I can identify that made the day a good day.

When you read quotes about life, you read things like, “Life isn’t measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.” That sounds beautiful, but how many daily ‘take your breath away’ moments do you really live in your daily life?

No, life’s not just about the breathtakingly special moments… it’s about filling you life with, and appreciating, the tiny little moments that make life worth living.

Fast and slow

We are having a renovation done and it’s about to move a lot faster. When electrical and plumbing are happening, the changes are incrementally slow, but this week they will start the drywall, and then things will start to move really quickly, adding walls, cabinets, and flooring. Soon we won’t remember what things look like now.

Kids are the same. Day to day you don’t notice them growing up, then suddenly they are adults. Day to day they are just your kids, but blink and suddenly they are their own people, with their own relationships, and work. The transition was slow, but looking back it seems so fast.

When you are building a home, things move both fast and slow.

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.