Temporal Perception

“Today is the most important day of my life.” Or so I, a five-year-old child, with a great seriousness, told my mother on August 25^th, 1999, before stepping into my kindergarten classroom for the first time. There are many aspects of the statement I made that day, my memory of it, other affiliated memories and the ways in which all these things relate to my temporal experience, which has mostly been defined by school hours and school years, that I wish to explore.

My first day of kindergarten was, as so many days have been, an important one to me. My first first day, my last first day and all the first days in between those two make up a group of  exciting days which collectively require pictures taken outside in the driveway, excitement and the perfect outfit. While I recognize that August 25^th of my kindergarten year was an important step in my scholarly pursuit, I would no longer label that day as “the most important day of my life.” While that model of understanding the importance of the day may have been appropriate in the moment, my views have changed. I now have a healthy fondness for the archetypal first day of school, which represents but does not equal each particular first day of school.

Each of these first days was, for its part, a beginning and, starting after kindergarten, a recurrence. My school career has been made up of twelve years, each year of a number of weeks, each week of approximately five days, and each day of roughly seven hours. If we attempt to break down these hours more, which we certainly may, we will encounter a problem with which Augustine has already grappled in Book Eleven of his Confessions. This exact problem was never one that occupied my brain for a great length of time, but the repetition in each hour, each day, each week, and each year has been an ever-constant, regular cycle in my life by which I have measured time and on which timeline I have marked the events of my life. For example, I had Physics class for two hours every day my junior year; I went to Argentina during the summer after that year.

I have already revealed with my changed interpretation one way in which my introductory statement is fallacious, and there are two other possible ways in which my memory may be flawed. One of these ways relates to the fact that my memory of that day is imperfect and secondhand. I can provide the day, the direct quotation, and the identities of the people involved in this exchange of words, but this is not because I explicitly remember the day and the conversation. Rather, I have this capability because my mother has told me on at least three separate occasions how adorable it was that I called my first day of kindergarten “the most important day of my life” with a straight face and an inordinate gravity. There are many other examples of moments at which I can look with fondness solely because of secondhand memories due to stories or photographs, such as an afternoon spent on the floor of the living room with my aunt’s dog Zeke, during which he obligingly endured my veterinarian game and my somewhat hideous blue zigzag-patterned sweater. It is interesting to contemplate the effect that secondhand memories have on a person’s temporal experience, particularly pertaining to the earliest years of one’s life.

The other way my memory may be erroneous is regarding the date of my foolish statement. In my memory, school always started on August 25^th, and it always started on a Wednesday. This rule is absurd, however, because August 25^th isn’t always a Wednesday. I cannot remember a time when school did not start for me on August 25^th, but I know that at some point it may have because this year classes started for the Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools district on the 27^th of August. Due to the pattern I once noticed and never forgot, my (already secondhand) memory is degraded because I impose the date of “Wednesday, August 25^th” onto each first-day memory I have. This distortion may not be in a meaningful way, as the generalization does not alter the content of my memory. However, acknowledging the slight change in the way I remember that day causes me to wonder what other patterns may have made themselves evident in my memories. If other patterns or generalizations I’ve noticed or made have replaced the truth in my memories, I fear I am not likely to recognize and correct them. The realization of this “August 25^th” pattern and its possibly leading me to blunder makes me afraid that large components of my temporal existence have been similarly tainted.

In my exploration of my statement to my mother on or about August 25^th, 1999, I’ve realized a few things about my temporal existence, my memories, and how these two concepts are interconnected. My temporal existence has been largely if not completely defined by school, be that definition in increments of years, semesters, classes or hours. What there is of my temporal existence, however my understanding of it may be structured, is not perfect. Some flaws originate in secondhand memories, affecting how my brain stores the information regarding each moment in my past. Other flaws originate from patterns I superimpose onto my memories to classify them or generalize them. These two sources of distortion in memory could also combine. That is, my mother could have applied her own patterns to her memory of “August 25^th, 1999” before she told me the story herself. It seems to me that one’s temporal existence is not entirely under one’s own control.