Time is an interesting concept because it contains both concrete and non-concrete elements. Together the two create a concept which is measureable through comparison but which will never be exact. The physical world allows for periods of repetition which allow for time; the movement of a pendulum or the vibrations of an atom. The mental world disagrees with these ‘rigid’ concepts and prefers to change how it perceives them. Perception is why time is such a difficult topic to conceptualize and understand for it alters from person to person, moment to moment, point to point. My personal experience of time is going to be different than yours and that is what makes this piece so important.
This will be the second time I’ve attempted to write this piece and the fifth or sixth time I’ve sat down to attempt it, but I still don’t think it has taken a long time. My perception of this work is that I have an idea of what time is, a personal connection with how I experience it, and that makes me perceive my effort as little but my production, relatively, great. I have spent a large amount of measureable time on this project, but a short amount of ‘personal’ time on it. Measureable time governs the world; it wakes me up at seven forty-five every day and tells me that you have either seventy-five or one hundred-and-five minutes before class starts. I know it takes between five and seven minutes to do my hair and brush my teeth, another ten to get fully dressed and ready to leave, maybe seven to pack my bag, and ten to walk to the dining hall, with twenty to thirty minutes for eating before class; so that’s fifty-four minutes, what about the other twenty or fifty. That is personal time, the time that is takes for my mind to experience everything, time to converse (which is always a perception altering event), time to prepare. Personal time is the time we perceive as occurring, the time that it has taken to write this paragraph so far is ten minutes, but it has felt like much longer because it involves more than just the physical work, it is mental in practice. When you are having a stimulating conversation time changes, it becomes a void, ignorable and indefinite; without this experience conversations would always seem so dull because of their length. However, when you begin a class on a subject you know very well, time changes to something entirely different. Minutes to hours, each word is another syllable closer to nodding off; it is as if time has become molasses trying to come out of a squeeze bottle, forced and lengthy. This is another perception of personal time, not a exciting or helpful, but still a perception. These are the elements of that day which make up time, the measurable manifestations of fifteen-hundred ticks and fifteen-hundred tocks for a class and the personal understanding which seems much more or much less. Time is an emotions concept which further changes how it can be experienced. Sad, here is a long, depressing, nonsense day which will make it worse; happy, have the best day ever; something else, time will be there to match you and amplify what is already there. If you try to become interesting in a topic which is in the moment boring you, then you will begin to alter your emotions and therefore you personal experience causing time to ‘change’. You cannot change physical time, it is measured and calculated and relative to whatever is being used to measure it; which makes it useful for planning but not so much for experiencing. Physical time is limiting, it doesn’t allow for enough some times, a too much others. Personal time makes up for these limitations by allowing the mind to understand time at a faster or slower pace so that you can experience a think tank with your pears in class to its fullest, or so that you can nod off in class and feel well rested.
Understanding time is difficult; if it was easy we would know how to change it. Time’s rigidity governs the world and allows for daily life to carry out relatively unhindered and for time to be planned for, for natural laws to exist, and for the past to be recorded for the future. Time’s fluid understanding allows for the mind to contemplate and converse for infinite amounts of time, a mind will never grow dull because it is always understanding things differently and time differently. When the two forms of time come together the conceptual experience of time is complete; rigid enough so that time must past and no good thing lasts to long but fluid enough so that the experiences that no one wants to miss or leave behind are gone so quickly they are never appreciated. Time is a relationship to me, it is something you must nurture and feed because it nurtures and feeds you. I respect time and its power to alter my perceptions and experiences because I want to experience more.
I got a little lost reading this because there’s a huge block of text in the middle which I feel could be broken up and many of the sentences are conversational in structure rather than more literary. I liked your evaluation of personal and measured time, especially when you said “Personal time makes up for these limitations by allowing the mind to understand time at a faster or slower pace” (to show you what I meant earlier: Going back to copy/paste that phrase, I realized that I skipped over about five lines of your essay when I read it before because the structure isn’t the most reader-friendly…) That’s a really interesting way of putting it; I’d never thought about the changes in rates of temporal perception as something my mind does to compensate but rather as a reflection of how bored I am during a length of time.