On Time

I came across this Einstein quote recently: “When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.”

Time is a strange thing to me. It is fluid. It is constantly flowing, and yet it feels so inconsistent. I always wake up within 2 minutes of my alarm, no matter what time I set my alarm for, no matter how long I have been sleeping. No matter what, my brain knows when I told it to wake up, even without the aid of any time piece.

If I set a microwave for any period of time, I always come back in under 5 seconds before it goes off. It's the same deal, just working on a smaller scale, and while conscious.

On my 30-minute lunch break, I somehow don't even get started writing on the blog until it is two-thirds over. I still have no idea where all that time went. I expected another 20 minutes to pass while writing this post, and yet somehow it's been only 6 minutes and I am nearly finished. (Yet, tomorrow, the same amount of words may take me four times longer to write.)

Time is a strange thing to me. And yet, perhaps because I am so aware of it, I have grasped some amount of control over it. When it matters, I take it into my hands. When it doesn't matter, I let it take over. It seems a fair balance and, though it can be disorienting at times, it is a method of operation which has treated me well.