100 Seconds, 100 Minutes

In the last few years, I seem to start every personal email with an exclamation about how time seems to be rocketing forward and I am constantly left feeling frazzled from playing catch up.

This had me thinking a few months ago about my experience of the relativity of time as I caught myself experiencing a lack of peace of mind from working to meet yet another deadline at work. I have read about the theory of relativity of time, but how does it actually impact me is something I haven’t given much thought to. I know for a fact that there are moments when I am present and mindful about my action, I experience an ‘elastic’ quality to time. My sense of seconds and minutes are no longer relegated to the ticking of the clock but indefinite ‘moments’ of presence.

This gave me the idea to create for myself a personal agreement with time. I don’t have to live in the collective agreement of “60 seconds to a minute” or “60 minutes to an hour”. I created with myself that in my world that there are 100 seconds to a minute, and there are 100 minutes in the hour. As I dress or eat or sleep or work, I would look at a clock and know that I have so much more time between the appointment or the deadline or the end of the night.

I figured that the 60 minute hour and the clock as we know it is a conceptual structure. It is a fundamental framework of how we structure reality. This common reference point makes it easy for us to communicate and get things done. At one point last year, I no longer felt it was making my life easy, instead I felt like I was a slave to this idea. I am no longer wanting to be feeling the ill effects driven the by the collective agreement of the clock and how much of our lives is locked in sync with it.

Now I pay attention to those moments between the ticks of the second hand. Pin pointing my attention in that moment we call ‘now’ allows me to ‘stretch’ it. I now experience seconds and minutes are elastic.

I have been living inside this new agreement of time now for a few months. I can say that the many moments of emotional frazzle have decreased significantly.