MORE ON TIME/ENERGY

When you (my daghter)called last night and asked what I did with my extra time, I didn't explain it to you correctly. Other people have asked me the same question and I have fobbed them off with an irrelevent list of activities. Here is the true answer:

I had rapid aging for three months recently, from the middle of June to the middle of September. I didn't know whether it was the end-game (death) or decline into frail old age; it took Pat (my daughter-in-law)saying seemed depressed to make me realize, after thinking it over, that I was.

The depression lifted when I hit this new level, frail old age. One of the interesting things about younger people is that they don't seem to understand time. I deal with this on the Bulletin Board (see somewhere below), but shall try to explain it in a little more here.

First of all, what is time? We don't really know. Its closest equivalent is energy. We perceive energy as motion; and we use motion to measure time, which is quite relative. This is, basically, what Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is all about.

Each observer sees an event in time relative to their position in space relative to the event and their distance from the event (which automatically means it is seen at a different time by the different observer.

We measure time by movement (as I said), but it is quite an arbitrary assignment of motion. In our particular world we measure time by the spinning of our earth and its orbit around our sun.

From some other observation point, the measure of time might be quite different. For example, we have estimated, by our time standard, that the cosmos is something like 14.5 billion years old.

I, personally, believe we are in the midst of a gigantic explosion which, by cosmic standards (the largest measure of time; unless of course, you can make the case for a god that comprehends all) might have been going on for only 14.5 seconds.

Okay, let's get down to the more mundane. There is also psychological time, or time as we perceive it. To babies, for example, time passes extremely slowly (because all of their energy is going into growth,
which is why they change so much, in the first six months especially. Whic is why they have so very little energy left over to impact on their concept of
time.

Now, taking it a step forward, think of children. Remember your own childhood, when the time between getting out of school and going into the house for dinner stretched endlessly? All that energy, all that motion, a child has slows the perception of time (actually, increases it, because our perception of time is all we have in our "nows").

Over our lifetimes, time gradually slows as our energy decreases, and therefore our motion. You will begin to find this very noticeable about the age and on. From here on time (your perception of it, and therefore your actual time) will gradually speed up, until by the time you get into your 70s and 80s you can't help but notice the speedup, which is no longer gradually increasing, but rapidly increasing.

When you get into frail old age, energy, and therefore motion, dips drastically. This is what I use to call the "rocking chair" stage of life. We don't have the energy to do anything, and time just zips by.

I'm aghast at how frequently I have to fill my weekly pill box. I sit at the table doing nothing, or not knowing what I am doing, and the new digital clock I bought beeps the hour, and two minutes later beeps the hour again. I don't know where the hour went.

People ask me what I did over the weekend, say, and I can't tell them. Because the answer is "nothing," and I
can't explain it to them. No one but the elderly know what time is like when you have no energy. My, my, how fast it goes by. I turned 85 yesterday, and I will be dead before I can turn around.

One main result of this loss of energy, and therefore of time, is that it takes a might effort of the will to do anything. And I mean anything. Write,
run an errand, file two sheets of paper, clean a dish, etc., etc. Personally, tThe only thing that doesn't seem to have slowed down on me is my mouth; I
can still talk and still write in an undisciplined manner, as this entry indicates.

So, the next time someone asks me what I'm doing with all the extra time (I lost my part-time job a couple months ago), I will tell them the truth: Nothing. They won't understand it, but I'll say it anyhow. Only if you've ever had a touch of sloth will you have a chance of grasping what time/energy and old age is all about.