Time and its "Relatives"

All time is not created equal.  There are minutes and hours that draaaggggggggg by, and others that seem to be gone before they're here.  As Albert Einstein said

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.

So now that I've mastered the theory of relativity (and who knew it would be so simple?), here are a few time distortions I've experienced personally.  Each experience or description is associated with the rate at which time seems to pass when engaged in the associated activity.

Reading, as in Proust's amazing description--FAST

And as each hour struck, it would seem to me that a few moments only had passed since the hour before; the latest would inscribe itself close to its predecessor on the sky's surface, and I was unable to believe that sixty minutes could have been squeezed into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden figures.  Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something that had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had deceived my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.   [Remembrance of Things Past]

Reading Proust--FAST (Because it takes a LONG time)

Sitting in meditation--SLOW

Lying in an MRI machine--Way SLOWER

Sitting at a traffic light when you're late--FASTER (paradoxically)

Waiting for a table when you're starving--SLOW

Waiting for your food to arrive when you're starving--EVEN SLOWER

The end of a difficult pregnancy--SLOWER

In labor--REALLY SLOW

Late for work--FAST

Ready to leave work--SLOW

Stuck in a boring meeting--SLOOOOWWWWW

After pressing the snooze button on my alarm--FAST

Working out on a stationary bike, for a set time--SLOW

Trying to finish a blog post when I need to be leaving for somewhere else--VERY FAST

What are some of your examples?

After a Horse Race, Back on My Own Horse

I made up a new life rule this week:  

Anytime I 

1) put in a full day shift collecting recall signatures at a polling place for a "spring" election (that's what they call this chilly, needed-my-gloves-and-long-underwear season);  

2) then stay up way too late waiting to learn of my candidate's narrow (204 vote) victory (for whom I, of course, did not electioneer while collecting recall signatures); and 

3) do so while continuing to put in hours on my two paid jobs, I am allowed to put off blogging until I have recovered.

So invoking that new rule, I did not blog Tuesday or yesterday, when all my free time was spent glued to the horse race for Supreme Court Justice in Wisconsin.  

My obsessive self worries that, having broken my year-plus string of weekday blog posts, I will have weakened my commitment to being a serious blogger.   But even my two youngest kids, who take the usual young persons' stance toward adult preococupations, have exerted some energy to encourage me to slack off, and to lighten up about the possible downward slide.

I may attempt to make up the missing posts--and I may not.  Time, and personal energy, will tell.

This is not going to be a season of "business as usual," whatever that was.

2010--The Year in Rearview, Part I

As I wade into the day this morning, I am made aware that the world around me is in an end-of-the-year mood of reflection.  Those in a position to know, or to think they know, are weighing in on the events of the last 363 days.  For example, Yahoo's Year in Review; and Twitter's; and YouTube's.  Or this from CNN.  Those so inclined can revisit the year's top movies, books, sports happenings, political remarks, and financial occurrences.  And for those like me who shield ourselves from negative messages, Esquire puts a positive spin on its look back, compiling, for the waning 2010, "One hundred and two reasons to celebrate, with videos."


I am preparing my own list of things I put to bed over the past year.  But today I am watching the last grains of sand slip heedlessly through their narrow glass passage, and feeling the import of those things I have not finished.  I am fighting the impulse to slam into some ultra gear and speed through a few more projects before midnight on Friday.  As of this moment, the year's countdown timer in this blog's sidebar informs me that I have 2 days, 13 hours, 10 minutes and 59 seconds, no 58, no 57, . . . to get it all done.  But since my other strong impulse is to give in to holiday week lethargy, it's pretty clear that I'm not going to go out with a bang in late late 2010.


2010 will not be the year I published my first book; finished cleaning and organizing my basement; re-conquered my fear of blood pressure cuffs; travelled to Ireland; mended the rifts in my step-family; ended my dance with procrastination; achieved buddhahood; reclaimed my gone-wild yard; found the key to my sons' futures; achieved my ideal weight; produced heart-stopping poetry; gained fame as a blogger; unsnarled my family's health bills and insurance communiques; brought my marriage back to its former glory; healed my frayed emotional state; or learned how to grieve for my father.  And the 2 days, 12 hours, 53 minutes and 32 seconds, no 31, no 30, . . . left are not nearly enough to advance these goals.


All that's possible, or sensible, I guess, is to keep moving forward, or in whatever direction looks like forward at the moment.  And to keep dropping those drops into the bucket.  And to try to see these artificial time allotments as little signposts, or mileage markers along the way, rather than as yet more deadlines.  (And we all know how much I love deadlines.)

Making Progress Sitting Down

Soooo. . . the good news is that my ankle isn't broken, though apparently we can now resolve the issue of whether or not there really was a fracture four years ago.  There was, and it left a small bone chip floating around at the site of that earlier injury, which is causing some of my current discomfort.  More good news is that I can continue to train for the triathlon which is now just over nine weeks away, with modifications subject to my healing process.  In the meantime, I have to keep icing, elevating, resting, and wearing the extremely sexy footwear shown here.  


Unfortunately, many of the things I feel some pressure to get done require standing and walking for significant periods of time.  Of course, there's always the strategy of relying more on family members to pick up some of the slack.  But they are already spending more time waiting on me for basic things while I am literally immobilized, and some of them are historically unlikely to carry their own weight, let alone mine, with respect to household chores--even in normal times.  


The floor of the room I am sleeping in to avoid the stairs is presently covered with hazards, as is the floor of the bathroom I am utilizing.  I have misplaced the cell phone I could use to call for assistance (after silencing it at meditation the other night), and can't get up to search for it.  I am beginning to lose my sense of humor about being hobbled and sidelined.  I would make a miserable handicapped person.


Two things come to mind as I reflect on this frustrating, but temporary situation.  One is Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," from his collection Welcome to the Monkey House.  Wikipedia summarizes it this way:

In the story, social equality has been achieved by handicapping the more intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society. For example, strength is handicapped by the requirement to carry weight, beauty by the requirement to wear a mask and so on. This is due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the United States Constitution. This process is central to the society, designed so that no one will feel inferior to anyone else. Handicapping is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon-Glampers.

Harrison Bergeron, the protagonist of the story, has exceptional intelligence, strength, and beauty, and thus has to bear enormous handicaps. These include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows. Despite these societal handicaps, he is able to invade a TV station, declare himself Emperor, strip himself of his handicaps, then dance with a ballerina whose handicaps he has also discarded. Both are shot dead by the brutal and relentless Handicapper General, who demonstrates the hypocrisy of such equality in the first place. The story is framed by an additional perspective from Bergeron's parents, who are watching the incident on TV, but because of his father's handicaps, and his mother's average intelligence, they cannot concentrate enough to remember it. 

While I don't necessarily see myself as superior to others, I can't deny that I am privileged in many ways.  Maybe it's only fair that I be slowed down from time to time in order to learn to appreciate my advantages, and to gain compassion for some of the difficulties others must work with all the time.  


The other thought comes from the book I am currently reading, Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish.  Kalish gives such a warm-hearted account of her family's survival tactics that the reader is hard put to locate the hardship in her experience.  In his blurb for the book's back cover, Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall, says:

Little Heathens is an enchanting but thoroughly unsentimental look at rural life in the Great Depression.  In clear, clean prose we are offered the grit, struggle, and also the joy of hard work on a farm.  I cherish this book for its quite naked honesty and quiet lyricism about a time which makes our current problems nearly childish. . . .

Maybe the legend of my fall could be a smidge less whiney.


For the time being, I am going to work at feeling a little less sorry for myself, and at figuring out how to move forward from my seat on the couch.  I don't have to experience this as procrastinating.  Rather, my body's momentary condition has taken me off some hooks, for now.  But not all.

Procrastinating 101: Working on Language

Dr. Neil Fiore wants us to talk to ourselves.  He just doesn't like what we are saying, much of the time.  (See above.)


Dr. Fiore is the author of The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, which I have been examining in my Tuesday Procrastinating 101 posts for the last few weeks.  In the chapter on "How to Talk to Yourself," Fiore elaborates on how resentment fuels procrastination.  In his view, when we experience alienation from the work we have to do, we adopt a victim mentality.   We perceive "others" or "them" as dictating what we must do.  This sets up an internal conflict between the self that must resist such "threat[s] to [its] integrity", and the self that attempts to direct us to accomplish the imposed task.  The conflict can be experienced as either a stress response or a depressive response.  (Or if we're really lucky, both!)  


According to Fiore, we can observe this mechanism at work by becoming aware of our language, or self-talk.  When we work from resentment, we tell ourselves, and often complain to others, that we "should" do this, and we "have to" do that.  When we use these words, says Fiore, we communicate to the subconscious mind

• I don't want to do it.
• They're making me do it against my will.
• I have to do it or else!--something awful and terrible will happen.  I will hate myself.
• This is a no-win situation:  if I don't do it I'll be punished; if I do it I'll be going against myself. [p.59]

Using Fiore's map, the way out of this morass is through marshaling the power of choice.  And our journey "from resistance to commitment" begins with that staple of self-help advice, learning how to say "no."  In this way, we begin to thin the number of tasks that are not of our choosing.  


Having trimmed our to do lists in this way, we can then "reprogram" our self-talk to experience the power of choice.  For this, Fiore offers "five self-statements that distinguish procrastinators from producers."  He directs us to:

• Replace "I have to" with "I choose to."
• Replace "I must finish" with "When can I start?"
• Replace "This project is so big and important" with "I can take one small step."
• Replace "I must be perfect" with "I can be perfectly human."
• Replace "I don't have time to play" with "I must take time to play." [pp.71-75]

One scary piece of advice Fiore gives is that we count the number of "should" statements we issue to ourselves in a ten-minute period.  This, he says, will give us "a good estimate of [y]our degree of depression."  I'm still working on my procrastination chart from last week--I'm a little behind in my procrastination homework.  What else is new?  But I have a feeling that when I get to this little test, I'm not going to like the results.  


In the meantime, I'm going to start on my language repair, because "I choose to."  But first, "I have to" switch off the circuit powering my oven before its malfunctioning beeping drives me insane.

Opportunity Costs: Doing as Not Doing

I learned about opportunity costs in one of the several degree programs which combined to keep me off the streets for years.  Basically, the term represents what we forego in making a choice between options--like choosing "what lies behind Door 2" on "Let's Make a Deal," and thereby losing out on whatever was behind Doors 1 and 3.  I haven't seen the show since long before Monty left, but I still remember the audience's unison "Awwww!" which attended the revelations of what the contestant could have had, had she or he chosen differently.  Of course, sometimes the contestant lucked out, and chose the best of the available prizes.  

In life, things are seldom so clear cut.  For one thing, there are way too many freakin' doors.  And we don't usually get to see right away, or ever, what we missed out on.  And there are costs as well as benefits that accompany each alternative.  And the various consequences are not, as I learned to say in planning school *commensurate.  Unlike Monty's offerings, we can't easily put a price tag on the value of our outcomes.  It would therefore be difficult to evaluate, even if we had all the information about the end results, whether we had won or lost.


But still the concept is intriguing.  You might say I have been haunted by potential opportunity costs since learning to consider them.  That's a fairly classy way to explain my trouble with decision-making and with moving ahead.


And still, it's true in more than the abstract that doing something means not doing something else.  Elementary, yes, but track-stopping nonetheless.  And fairly overwhelming in retrospect.

My two-year-old grandson and his mom are working on this.  My wise daughter will attempt to gain his "buy-in" by presenting him with simple, dichotomous choices, like "Do you want to walk to the house or be carried?"  When he is not moved to articulate his choice, or to begin walking, she will say "You are choosing to be carried.  Is that what you want?"

It could be a useful tape to have in one's head, if not overplayed.  Where was the voice when I needed it, the one that would have calmly confronted me on many distracted occasions, that I was "choosing not to do my dissertation," or to work on my novel, or to get a life?

While it's important, I believe, not to mistake ourselves for mostly rational beings, it doesn't hurt to attempt rationality from time to time.  It's good to keep opportunity costs in mind, though this rational tool won't play a lead role in our "decisions"--some made at other than a conscious level anyway--of what to do.  But it's good, too, to keep this tool on a leash, or it just might lead to paralysis.  Imagine trying to think about the universe of what we aren't doing in initiating a single act, let alone every act!

---

* I know, I know.  Yes, I really went to a highly regarded planning program, and got a master's degree in urban and regional planning, for all the good it did my personal organization style.

Oh, yeah, Sacred Awe

In her book Broken Open:  How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Elizabeth Lesser attributes to Albert Einstein the statement that "the most appropriate response to life is Sacred Awe."  I have been unable to verify whether Einstein said this, exactly, though it seems to fit with other things he did say.  But reading these words recently had a strong impact on the way my life felt to me for several days afterward.  And I don't think it matters who uttered them.


For some reason--timing, need, or some other susceptibility--encountering those words at that moment opened my eyes.  Like putting on Avatar's 3-D glasses.   Things around me stood out, things I normally "know" but that blend into the backdrop of my tedious little melodrama.   And the obviousness of the majesty that surrounds me and includes me, and my everyday blindness, was beyond the V-8 head smack realization ("I could have had a V-8!").  More like "Oh, no!  I forgot to have children!"  But bigger.


I was stunned by my failure to notice the enormity, the complexity, and the beauty I inhabit. And my propensity to get lost in the grass of annoyance.   Even my very real sorrow and suffering can't hold a candle to this world, in which Avatar, with its visual splendor and compelling society, is just one of many visions.  How can any sunrise not command my attention?  How do I numb myself to the sense of astonishment called out in the presence of a small child's learning?  Or the perfect arrangement of my dog's fur?  Or all the moments in a stranger's life?  Or birdsong?  Or government?  This laptop. . . .


For those several days that followed this realization, my equilibrium was restored.  My priorities were shifted.  My perspective was new.  My heart was calmed and my spirit enlivened.  When I tried to communicate this understanding to others, I sounded like a simpleton.  Because it is simple.  


Maybe this is what Buddha meant by awakening.  But, in my experience, it is hard to stay awake.  Easy to slip back into the familiar absorption in to do lists and worrying, and all the other inappropriate responses to the universe we routinely make.  The awakened view remains for me as one of the many channels I can tune to.  It's "programming" is in HD, but the reception is iffy.  


But Sacred Awe is the appropriate context for this "recovery tale," and for all our stories.  It shouldn't be that hard to remember.