What is time?

Sometimes I am surprised how fast the day goes by. “Time” is seriously a strange concept. Even though every day has the exact same amount of hours and minutes, it’s curious how some minutes can feel like hours and vice versa.

I am a person who can hardly live without her watch. I like it when I wake up in the early morning and a glimpse at my watch tells me that I have another hour before my alarm goes off. I can curl up and go right back to sleep, knowing that there is a whole lot of time until I have to get up. If I don’t look at my watch, I strangely feel nervous about what time it is and will keep wondering if I will miss my alarm or not.

Then again, sometimes I totally forget to look at my watch when I am at work and will only realize that it must be around 11:30 a.m., because my supervisor heads off to lunch. Where did the hours go?
On other days, time will not go by and I’ll catch myself starring at my watch every 10 minutes.

I find it fascinating that the human brain can perceive time in such different intensities.
I remember as a kid, 6 weeks of summer vacation felt like an eternity. I miss that feeling of having never-ending time that I had as a kid. The older one gets, the faster time catches up with you and one feels like there is never enough of it.

I also feel a strange difference in time perception during summer and winter. In the summer, when the daylight lasts longer and one spends lots of time outdoors because of the wonderful weather, days aren’t just longer because of daylight savings, but they also feel longer.
Even though I do like the winter when it gets dark early and you can sit inside with lit candles and enjoy the coziness of the season, days are not only shorter due to the shorter daylight, but they also feel shorter.

So is time merely the counting of seconds, minutes and hours or is it a personal feeling that is very subjective and forever changing?

Whatever it is, there are moments when my watch and my mind are completely in tune… like right now, telling me that it is time to go home :)

  1. I hear ya… when you have a good time, time just flies!! Unfortunately. So you just gotta try to enjoy every second!

    And when you can’t wait for the minutes to go by, you should just do something that keeps you occupied, so you don’t focus on the time so much.

    Oh, well all these mind games…. it is really interesting.

  2. thats a great blog entry, i enjoyed it a lot!

  3. and im jealous of your writing abilities….

  4. Ah yeah time is a funny concept… ;-) I like that my DVD player has a fast forward and fastbackward button so I can at least play with time there.
    Smooch!

  5. I really enjoyed this post!

  6. i also gotta admit that i really enjoyed this post and had a few thoughts back in time. the thought of having 6 weeks of summer vacations was really such a long time.:-) long long ago;-)

  7. yes your english is so good, i could never write like that in english. so cool. anyway, time is flying by and before you know it we will be back from germany already. :(

  8. honestlt, i don’t care what time it is right now. all i know is that i’m on vacation! :)

    oh and as long as your mind and watch are ready for the long weekend in southern cali WITH US next week, everything’s swell and pretty much on time if you ask me! *smooches*

  9. You did a great job! I loved to read this post – really well written!
    Since the kids were born I feel like time is running away like crazy. It seems like yesterday that Annika was born and in May she will turn 3. Amazing…there is no Feierabend with Kids unfortunately. ;-)

  10. Speaking of time, and it flying, it has been one year since we became blogging buddies through NaPlaBloMo (whatever). I’m still reading your blog and loving your writing.

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