The Passing of Time
Filed under: customers, gadgets and gizmos, HTC, lifestyle, mobile handsets, mobile internet, mobile phone, smart phone, T-Hub, technology, thinking
As I sit here at home relaxing in front of the TV, I mute the sound and realize that there is no Tick or Tock to tell me that time is continuing to pass by.
There is a clock on the T-hub, the TV, my HTC HD2 phone, oh and can’t forget my laptop and yet not a sound is heard. Whatever happened to the sound of time?
Gone are the days where I would wake up with such a fright, I would be de-clawing myself from the ceiling after the clock bellowed its ringing of the bells. Now it’s a gentle boing boing boing from my T-hub.
Quick time check. T-hub, 8:10, smart phone 8:10, TV, 8:10, laptop, 8:10 and not one of them did I set. Looking back I remember the days where I would dread daylight savings time. Time to change all the clocks. UGH. Do I change them back an hour or forward an hour? It took me years to remember which way the clock goes until I learnt a great way to remember. Just like the seasons we change the clock. In Spring the clock springs forward and in Autumn, time falls back just as the leaves fall. As much as Technology has freed me of the stress its great seeing some of the history of daylight savings.
It seems to me that the wonders of technology can make time slip by quietly – almost un noticed. But if you pay attention to what is actually happening: the seasons, what you see in the mirror and what is happening in your life you can easily track Father Time and his relationship with Mother Earth.
Does time matter to you ? Does life seem to be going faster?
Time sure matters now I have a young family. Geez, time flies and I have learned to manage my time better to ensure I have some down time and also quality moments with my wife and kids.
My eldest daughter and I go on a weekly outing and also we take our youngest out for an hour or two to give my wife a break. I manage all this and more with me Google calendar and free SMS alerts.
Larry
Thanks so much for the “spring forward” method of remembering what to do with Daylight Savings. I remember “port” and “starboard” on ships by saying “There’s some port left in the bottle.” ie port is left.
I think time is a tricky devil. This year is flying by but sometimes Friday afternoons seem to go at a snail’s pace.
Cheers
Kristen
Unfortunately I still require an alarm that jolts me awake – otherwise I simply dont hear it and slumber on way past wake up time. Agree Kristen this year is flying past at a rediculous rate.
I remember an email a while ago, stating that as a five year old, one year represents 20 per cent of your life so far – hence why years seemed to take forever to pass when you were a kid.
When you’re 10, things are moving a bit quicker, one year is now only 10 per cent of your life.
By the time you’re 20, one year is only 5 per cent of your life, things are flying by – one day you were leaving high school, the next you’re graduating… though I’m guessing the diminishing value of time had less to do with this than student nights at the local, but that’s a story for another time.
You hit 40, and one year is only 2.5 per cent – your kids will be growing up before your very eyes. One day they were crawling, walking and talking the next, before you know it they’re starting school.
At 60 a year only makes up 1.66 per cent. It feels like yesterday your kids were at school, now they’re off doing what you were doing 40 years ago.
When you’re 80, you don’t dare blink.
I think the older I get the faster times seems to go. Not sure if it is because of new technology
making things move faster / quicker and/or more efficient, but what I do know is – I ensure any time saved made by new technology
is then spent on friends and family, things that make me happy – not more work. This helps me balance the TIC and the TOC.
Gotta run – bye!!
It’s very true!
Gone of the days where Christmas seemed like a life time to come around.
Nowdays I find half the year has gone by feeling as though i have only just gotton over the hangover from new years eve.
Where does the time go?
Gwynn, I think of time in a similar way. I see as each year that passes is a fraction of the time lived. For example when you turn 2 a year is half your life. 3, it’s a third, 4, a quarter and so on. When we start to get to the higher numbers for example 55 it’s a much smaller fraction of your life so it feels faster.
Kristen. Brilliant. I have never been able to get the name of each side of the boat. I will always get it correct now. Thank-you.
Hey there Larry,
I still have my faithful clock ticking beside my bed, tick tock tick tock. It sooths me to sleep every night. And yes after all these years it still scares the crap out of me each morning when that alarm goes off. Also have my other clock that gongs on the hour every hour, but have stopped it gonging as it’s too noisy in an apartment. Also have a couple of ticking clocks in the caravan, you can’t beat that ticking sound.
Time and tide waits for no man……
Time has so many cliche’s than mirror our lives, it can be a tool of fear, or a tool of joy, from waiting for that important call that can change your life, or destroy it forever.
Time can only be measured by the moment as yesterday has gone, and tomorrow hasnt arrived. Time is invisible, sure we have clocks but the essence of time cannot be held or contained or traded or shared as a mass. The time has come to embrace the moment……
Come to think of it…I often wonder where my time goes, and admittedly, it’s due to the computer (facebook). and even when I’m not on facebook, I’m texting, as you well know ; ) I never really realise how much time is taken up using technology. Maybe I should try and give it up for a week…see how I go ; )
hey larry,
great blog you have, i never knew you were a diver?
that’s so cool!
hope we can catch up soon with the family
cyaa xx
I think this is interesting coming from the perspective of a gen-Y, as most of my memories of ticking clocks are from an age where time has no meaning yet. Perhaps because of this, the tick of a clock now suggests a sense of otherness and antiquity, and yet something so organic and ‘real’ that I feel I’ve missed out on something.
I’m laughing over this, but……Good luck finding a tick tock alarm clock in the world today.!!
I recently tried to find an old style reliable clock when my new shiny electronic clocks all kept breaking. (I’m up to 3 broken ones so far)
Not only is it seriously difficult to find a tick tock clock, but the only ones you can find are travel clocks, and they are tiny. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Maybe I was sleeping when the world decided that everything in our lives needed to be electronic.
At eighty five I look forward to the weekend (We have a cooked breakfast!). But the five days in between go mighty fast!.
My two Linux PCs keep me up with the passage of time.
I can still remember the time when Telecom Australia let me download a few kilobytes in five hours!.
I’m would not be surprised if you cant get an App for your HTC that makes it \Tic toc\ and \ring\ like an old alarm clock.
Interestingly, the human brain automatically blanks out regular sounds after a period of time. If you enter a room with a loud ticking grandfather clock which is very noticeable for the first few minutes, your active brain then effectively disregards it as unimportant and you stop hearing it, even though the sound is still there. If the clock stops ticking though, you will immediately pick that up via the autonomic part of your brain, which is still monitoring it. I find the same thing happening when I get asked to take the garbage out
Tina, beautifully written. It reminded me of the expression “tomorrow never comes”, and yet it also reminded me of the Eurythmics song “When Tomorrow Comes”. In the song there is a line, I can’t wait, I can’t wait for when to tomorrow comes. HMMM Poor Annie Lennox. She might still be waiting.
Courtney, as it states in my profile, I’m addicted to Facebook. There is an upside to spending “time” on Facebook and texting. I don’t see it as “time” wasting. It means you are still communicating and communication is not a waste of time. If any thing it saves “time”. It saves “time” by not having to travell to the person(s) you are communicating with. Albeit 2 dimmentional. As long as there is an equal balance in the real world. AHH technology…
Ben, thats funny. I can’t say I have come across an app like that. I could just imagine it would drive people NUTS. Oh I just thought, some one had a Tick Tock app turned on and the mobile was is a bag. A bag ticking. I’m running.
Stan, its fantastic that you have embraced technology. My Father of 79 gave it ago. HHMMM there were tears. I must say, he has more clocks than you can shake a stick at through out the house. I was there one time when it was the change of day light saving. Being the helpful son that I am, I offered to change them. By the time I’d finished it was next week. Thank goodness technology is changing that.
oh my techno friend……great blog, i could never remember which way to turn the clocks for daylight savings, thanks for that. luckily i can now use your wisdom because in my world there is still the alarm clock, my watch, the wall clock,the oven, the microwave and the car to still manually change!
Personally, I don’t believe in time. We did, after all, make it up. Now if only I could get the REST of the world to agree, maybe we wouldn’t have so much trouble keeping up with/racing the clock!
I have started to believe that ‘time and tide waits for none’…this year is passing by at a ridiculous speed! As everyone else has said , I think technology takes up most of my time…the only exception might be when I am sleeping!
Your way of remembering daylight savings is awesome, I remember when I almost arrived 1 hour late in my semester exam—because I was intelligent enough to ignore my uni mail which said the time has changed!
Thanks Writabrata, glad I could be of some assistance, albeit small. I love the way Kristen remembers which side of the ship is which. Portside is left cause there is port left in the bottle.
Collin, I was going to say, thank-you for taking the time to comment however you dont believe in time so how would I say it in another way. Can I say thanks for taking a moment. UMM a momemt is a measurment of time. Help me out here please Collin.
Time was invented to stop everything from happening at once. It clearly doesn’t work very well.
After years of mains-powered clock radios with various levels of singing and dancing abilities, I’m currently using a small battery-powered analog alarm clock, with a gentle tick-tock, and I love it. It goes for a couple of years on a single AA battery. It’s very easy to change the time and the alarm time. It does not have a snooze function so I set it for as late as possible, and get up when it goes off. I used to use the snooze function on my clock radios, but now I reckon they just rob you of sleep for no benefit.
The only improvement would be some way of seeing it in the dark, but I keep a small LED cupboard light next to it, which is also very useful for any midnight toilet breaks.
I’m slowly weening myself off the snooze button for much the same reason – you don’t usually gain any extra sleep before it next starts buzzing away. Thankfully on my Desire it’s actually a difficult button to hit, so it’s much easier just to kill the alarm and get up. By the time I’ve focused enough to his snooze, I’m already wide awake.
The other odd thing about snooze buttons is alarms sometimes have them set for odd lengths. I’ve had two bedside alarms that were locked in at 8 or 9 minutes for the snooze, seemed an odd time period to snooze for.
time is the mother of all the evil stuff i can do when i am bored
Larry, I reckon “Thanks for manipulating the the gazillion cells in your body to produce action on your keyboard resulting in the transmission of your words to this site.” just about covers it. Just about.
What? I didn’t say anything about being an ‘atimist’ making life easy did I?
Life is certainly going faster – each year it seems. We rely so heavily on technology to orchestrate our day. The necessity to be somewhere at a particular time consumes us more that we realise. It is only when we actually “stop” and take in the moment, whether it be noticing a sunset, or taking in the colours of the rainbow, or watching the rain or actually listening to the sound of a bird, does time actually slow down and we remember that “moment” for as long as we choose. That moment costs us nothing and doesn’t appear on a clock, or watch or mobile or computer. Yes, time is passing quicker every year – life’s expectations are squeezing time from us. Speed is generated by time – “There is More to Life than Increasing its Speed”.
I think time goes faster as you get older because your life becomes filled with mundane, routine things you have to do. As you get older you attend to more and more of these daily tasks which keeps you from experiencing free time which is the only time we register. When you were a kid and had no responsibilities and no need to worry about anything – someone else attended to that boring stuff. All your time was free – it all registered. No need to check you turned things off or locked up, got the keys, money, pills … check! Nor did you need to spend time putting on makeup so you didn’t scare small children. That can take some time! and you need glasses to do it. You have to find your glasses first. The younger you didn’t need to find glasses to see or read anything, you didn’t need to read!
As you get older you tend to bother with getting a chair rather than jumping up to a high shelf – but the chair is in another room and it’s covered stuff, and you bother to put it back afterwards because no-one else will…
Every action is complicated by an age related difficulty – special tools to open jars. Battery operated can openers … find the batteries… get a screw driver small enough to open the casing… no that one will wreck the screw and you’ll never get it open…. find the smaller one … it’s not in there where it should be…. someone’s moved it…. ask everyone where it is……15 mintues later you open the can… all dead time.
You can’t even open biscuit packets in the kitchen without getting the scissors anymore. Where are my glasses now? I need to read the instructions on the packet……etc. .. It all chews up your free thought time, but you have to do it. You have no choice, life just gets complicated..keys…glasses..etc
Donna that’s so true. As adults we are so distracted by our responsibilities we miss out on the little things we used to love as kids. A girl at work once showed me a picture of a flower. It was a flower as kids we called a Fairy Flower. It’s the one that looks like a ball of fluff and you could blow off the fluff and they would float like fairies. You know the ones. I told her the story and in the conversation we concluded we miss the little things. Part of the conclusion was we don’t stop and sit in the grass as we did as kids which means we don’t see these little miracle balls of fluff. If we all stopped to enjoy the little things time would be far more enjoyable. Whoopi Goldberg of “The View” in closing she quotes “Take a little time to enjoy the view”. I love that. Maybe we should start a movement where every day everyone should simply STOP and take in what’s around you. I mean really stop. If it was done at a different time every day, imagine what we will see.
Does anyone else agree we should have a “TAKE IN THE MOMENT” movement?
Hey Collin, I was exhausted after manipulating all the gazillion cells. I had to take some time out he he he. Does this mean I can now call myself an atimist?
This was so well written. I have read it several times and it gets me thinking every time.
Although time has become easier with T-hub, the TV, my HTC HD2, it hasnt made time itself easier. What did happen to the ticking clock you can just look at and view without having to find some form of tecnology to press a button to see the time.
I for one fear time. I have to remove the batteries out of any ticking clock as it is just a reminder that our time on earth does come to an end at some point and only time knows when this will be. Like the precious saying ” only time will tell”.
I refuse to wear a watch as I will not watch time go by!!!!!!
Thanks Larry…I realize how quickly time goes by when I look at my girls. It feels like it was only yesterday my eldest was born, she turned 23 recently!! I think to myself sometimes…it will be in a blink of an eye and Chloe will be turning 23…My eldest will be 38!!…I wish we could slow down the clocks for maybe just a bit, they go waaaay too fast
Hilary, that is so true. I have never though of it that way. It brings me back to the time not log ago where I wanted to turn the TV off. Do you think I could find the remote. Not for the life of me. The house was turned up side down, even looked in the freezer. Yeah I know, no need to say any thing.. NUTS but I was getting frantic. Even the cat had hidden herself under the bed. I gave up. Went to bed after finaly convincing myself that it will all be OK in the morning. Next morning I woke up and had a “light bulb moment”. I had packed an old phone back into its box. Sure enough the remote was in the box. So that killed about 2 hours just to turn the dam TV off. SHEEZZZZ. I tell you what though you hit a nerve about the biscuit packets. I though it was just me and now I know I’m not alone. EEKKS I’m getting old.
For me time is dictated by the diary, one on the phone, the fridge, at work and on the work phone……it’s a case of “I’m at basketball at night, it must be a Monday or Wednesday between 5-7″ or “it’s Wednesday morning….management meeting”…I roughly know what time it is, by where I am , or where I’m supposed to be, or where I am about to be!
Now, how to sync all the clocks in the house after a powerfaliure or when daylights savings begins or ends….that’s the invention I want to have….
Nice blog Larry…keep it up
x
I luv time and love to use my memory to travel along it backwards and forwards. This usually happens when I am trying to put my photos in order and spend hours and hours remembering and reliving the moments laughing and crying as if I was there. Seeing old friends and my mum and dad I can hear their voices my dads jokes and my kids were they ever that small. Thats my time machine.
Its so true Larry! The mobile phone is my alarm clock, watch, calendar and the world times is useful when you are travelling. Although I do have a clock on the wall, I often use Foxtel to tell me the time. How funny!
Time and the years are passing by so quickly but I will always remind myself of those special moments, the times that I laughed, received advice and especially those good times.
Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick,
and think of you
caught up in circles confusion–
is nothing new
Flashback–warm nights–
almost left behind
suitcases of memories,
time after–
(C Lauper and R Hyman)
Well Peter I now have that song stuck in my head. Thank-you. I can clearly remember when Time After Time was playing on the radio. Its taken me back to the 80′s. EEKKKSSS. Music is so powerful in how it can make you step back in time. Oh I think there is another song. All you can do is Step Back In Time. (Kylie Minogue)
I’ve always found, in recent years, that my body clock suffices in keeping me up to speed. Trams and trains are never on time, clients and friends will never be on time also. As we progress I find that allowing Mother Nature to control my body clock is much simpler. GO the Old Dame!
Heather, photos are a great way to pass the time. As you say they take you back and forth in time. Technology has certainly changed the way we view our photos. For a while there I was finding that photos were not like they used to be. Flipping through the physical photo album was changed to the clicking of the mouse. Digital photos just didnt seem the same. Thats now changed for me due the T-HUB having the feature as a digital photo frame. I have loaded all my photos into it and every now and then a set it to random slide show. I don’t sit in front of it and watch. I glance at it and there is a different photo therefore it stems emotion every time. I love it.
Irony… The T-HUB has an anolog clock and yet not a Tick or a Tock is heard, but hey it looks good
Louise, I cannot bear the sound of a ticking clock either. There’s a small clock in the office which ticks, I have to have the radio volume quite loud to drown the incessant noise, shall get around to throwing it out when I get the time…..
Not long now till daylight savings starts. October 3. Remember just like the season in Spring the clock springs forward.
That is a fantastic way to remember daylight savings as always struggled with that one! Great blog and now that Darcy is in my life I can truly relate to time passing by way too quickly and always being very conscious of the time – feed time, sleep time, nappy change time…..!!!
ahhh! it all makes sense now. thanks
i always hated trying to find out which way it went. and everyone you ask tells you a different thing