My goodness, doesn’t time fly. In the month of May this coming year I’ll have been retired for 5-years, yes, that’s 60 months, or 260 weeks, or more days than my mental arithmetic can calculate. And you know what, it’s rather worrying just how quickly that time has passed by. Does time really speed up when you get older or am I just enjoying myself too much to notice?
I’m an early riser, usually leaping from bed around 6.00 am, or rather carefully alighting from the bed, pausing for a moment to get the head working, before making my way to the door, making sure I avoid stubbing a toe of the bed leg and into the hallway. There, silently closing the bedroom door to avoid disturbing Cathryn who certainly does not want to be aware at 6.00 am!
There follows breakfast, usually sitting at the computer doing something or other, mostly working on Planet Gary. And this is where time starts flying by. Then, in what seems no time at all, it’s after 8.00 am. Two hours have passed in the blink of an eye. At 8.30 am, I always have my first coffee of the day, along with a four-fingered Kit-Kat. So, better get showered and dressed. Then, equally suddenly it’s now 10.00 am. Four hours have now vanished since I rose from bed. Where does the time go?
That sets the format for the remainer or the day. I’ll usually do something in the morning, most often out on the bike for a couple of hours. Then it’s lunch time and before you know it, 2.00 pm comes along and I find something else to do. Perhaps I’ll potter about in the shed, working on one of my bicycles or whatever. Doing jigsaws seems to be the fastest way to spend time, or looking at mindless crap on Facebook. Suddenly, it 5.00 pm and time for the evening meal. The evening does the same way and then it’s time for bed and the daily cycle starts all over again.
But, of course, time does not actually speed up or slow does, does it? I recall those long hot sultry days of the school summer holidays, long weeks that seemed to last forever. Or those long boring days at work when finishing time could not come soon enough. Time most certainly seemed very slow on those occasions. But what about when you get older and have to actually work for a living. Does that two-week annual leave not fly past all too quickly? Our perception of does appear to vary from time to time.
Perhaps one question we might ask is what actually is time? And I have asked that question and the answer is far too complicated for mere humans to comprehend, perhaps other than the simple premise of a measure between moments, such as the daily cycle from day to night from the revolutions of a planet or the coming round of the next episode of Peaky Blinders. But here’s a thought, what if there was no way to measure those intervals? What if the Earth did not revolve or Peaky Blinders was cancelled. Could we still measure time, would time actually exist? Probably.
I think of reason why time seems to fly past for me since I retired is that I no longer live by the clock or rather my daily activities are no longer ruled by time, as they do when you are working full-time. When you are working time is often controlled. Start and finish times, coffee break times, meeting require timeous timing, even those bloody meetings about having meetings are timed. Sometimes each and every task you preform, or not as the case might be, are timed. When you are employed, time rules supreme.
But when I retired all those time constraints vanished. I no longer wear a watch, I can eat, go to the toilet, watch tv or go to bed whenever I want. There are no clocks to govern my activities. Yet, I still stick to the norms of breakfast, lunch and dinner times, mostly because they are sensible times of the day for eating i.e. when you get hungry. What I have noticed is that I never seem to know what day of the week it is, and as to the actual date, no idea what-so-ever. However, I’m still okay with the months and years, at least so far. Anyway, time for another coffee.
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