Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Old Father



Time – it’s a concept which I have been mulling over recently - blink and it’s gone.

An abstract concept which for me is up there with the 5th dimension, not entirely comprehensible. Yes I can measure it, something mankind has been doing quite successfully since, well, since the beginning of time but I still find it slightly out of reach. If I think about it, it’s already gone. I can’t eat it, touch it, breath it – I just know it’s there, always ticking along.

Where does it start and where does it end?

People make a living from it – a whole industry dedicated to its measurement resides in this small Alpine country, Usain Bolt is a superstar because of it, greeting card companies and Microsoft Outlook exists purely because it’s there.
Without it we would always be late, early or on time but who would know? It’s a strange thing.

It’s been one year since I started this blog, I know this because my son is about to reach his first major time-unit milestone, that is, one year.
And here lies the problem with time, a year is one of the larger time measurement units, in colloquial language it could be catogrised as a “long time” however the fact a year has passed since Cameron was born is simply barking mad.
If I logically think about it it makes sense but my initial reaction is to tell you to fuck off, no way, not a chance, a year, come on?

It was exactly a year ago tomorrow that I was standing on a far away sun-kissed beach in my finest kilt watching my best friend marry before rushing back to Switzerland to help deliver our son into the world. I say help, my wife delivered him, I watched and said stuff of a vaguely comforting nature.

That was never a year ago, it was yesterday, last week or perhaps last month at a stretch but a year….
As we age, the intervals between the time measurements get shorter, a year in Cameron`s life is, well, his whole life. In my life it’s just a couple of weeks.

Another strange phenomenon related to time is that its speed is directly related to what we are doing. If I have a day of tax training the day will drag on for weeks or months. My friends tell me when I am talking time slows to a crawl, but a night at the pub is over in less than an hour. Ask any time scientist, if one exists and he will confirm the existence of this phenomena.
I blame this on the complaints I used to receive relating to my lovemaking stamina. I can last for hours but in my partner`s mind it is over in seconds.
Time does fly......
Anyhow you will imagine my delight when in the midst of this time analysis I went to the cinema to watch “Inception”. The film perfectly captures the time inequity when it comes to dreaming. A 1 minute real time dream can last a day in dream time, a dream within a dream`s time is multiplied again by the 1min-1day factor. Thus 1 minute of dreaming a dream within a dream is nearly a month of dream time and so on.

Following this logic a 30minute real time dream would be 50 years in a dream, within a dream, within a dream. A lifetime can occur during the time it takes for an episode of Eastenders to be broadcast. As crazy as this sounds, it also sort of makes sense.

I like the idea and will keep working on the theory: logically if 30mins = 50 years then an hour = 100 years.

At this point I might actually start accepting a year has passed since I was in Mauritius, Cameron was born and I have now turned 40.

Which was probably the reason I started thinking about the whole thing in the first place.

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