8.22.2012

A diferent time piece

Gabbi (Noon o'clock) - 082212

I saw the first red leaf of fall today, and I was also thinking about change - it's cyclic and reflects nature.

A few days ago Carla mentioned noticing the changes around her in a comment she shared on my last post.  Recently I've felt tick-tock time is losing its meaning to me.  I am losing my ability to feel the seconds go by and know what part of the clock the hands are resting on.

If people have super powers, I have had two.  I can almost always tell where north is.  From that I can usually point toward any direction.    I am sitting in a windowless room right now, and just pointed north and then checked it on my iPhone compass.  I was off by less than 5 degrees.  This doesn't mean I don't get lost.  It just means I usually get un-lost pretty fast. 

Sadly, my second super power, being able to intrinsically tell tick-tock time without looking at a clock and being accurate within 15 minutes is fading fast and is nearly gone.  For many years, I only carried a watch when to-the-minute accuracy was needed.  Now I wear a watch so I know which hour it is in tick-tock time.

I use the term tick-tock time to represent the human-made time measurement system based on seconds, minutes, and hours.  While it is dividing a solar year down into 365 days (not including leap year) with 24 hours in a day, with each hour consisting of 60 minutes, and each minute containing 60 seconds.  That is 525,600 seconds in a year.  I have no mechanism in me to note the passage of a second, minute, or hour anymore.

If we are healthy, our resting heart rate is around 60 beats-per-minute (bpm).  I can't trust my heart to tell time though.  When I sleep, it drops to less than that rate.  If I am excited, it can easily double.  Without having an internal mechanism anymore to tell tick-tock time, where am I getting my cues?  The natural universe provides it.

The earth's daily rotation provides a good basic visual time piece, light or no light.  My next favorite is the 28 day lunar cycle.  I know that if it is a new moon now, it will be a full moon in 14 days.  I am always looking up at the moon, when visible to give me a clue as to it's path.  Here is a link to learn about the phases of the moon. 

For the past few years I've felt the seasonal transitions more and more.  I like some more than others, preferring fall and winter to spring and summer.  I feel each one though.  Every August I can tell when autumn is coming by noticing the lengthening of shadows and the quality of light around me.  I feel the winter solstice by enjoying the long, dark, cold days of winter.  The seasonal changes are one measurement of time I feel deep in me.

Maybe my spirit is trying to tell me something with my loss of ability to internally tell tick-tock time.  It isn't the second that separates present me from past and future me.  It is the changing of the universe around me affected by the cycles we physically go through.  I can't control these cycles.  All I can do is recognize them and make sure I live as much as possible through them. 

 

6 comments:

  1. Karl, I can totally relate to this post. Tick-tock time has gone, well, maybe syncopated would be a good word for what it feels like to me now. It didn't used to. Sometimes the rate of time seems to fluctuate acrass a range almost as wide as I remember from earliest childhood, particularly when I'm alone. Hours evaporate leaving no trace, minutes drag out to feel like hours. I'm lost somewhere between two great old songs dealing on the subject... Pink Floyd's observations from "Dark Side of the Moon", of course, and Paul Simon's great "Time Time Time" (the one The Bangles covered so well for the movie). These are strange days for me. I'm kind of hoping they're a temporary thing.

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    1. CD. I like the term "syncopation.". So many of those cues around us.

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  2. Gorgeous Gabbi!!!! I love the covered crotch shot, especially when panties are black, or it's a dancer showing the nether part of her dance costume. It's that erotic zone that I think is all the more appealing when it keeps some of its mystery, like that erotic zone between garter belt and black stockings.

    Thank you for taking up the cycles of time idea. I think our sense of time fluctuates throughout your life depending on what you're doing at the time. Mine has been different this summer because of the two months of building at my house. The workmen arrived fairly regularly between 7:30 and 9 and left late afternoon. So I began to perceive time by the building activity.

    What stopped me the day I commented on your post was looking down at the walk and seeing a red and gold autumn leaf. What a surprise! I think it's summer until I see an autumn leaf. Then my thoughts automatically transition into autumn, and everything in my life takes on a different feeling.

    Time is the enemy of us all, as Tennessee Williams once said, because it is all we have in the end, and its loss IS the end. Yet, the cycles of time are a fascination to me and a comfort sometimes. Time seems to have no substance of its own, yet it's the most powerful component in this temporal world, something like the unseen wind forming a tornado funnel or the underground movement of an earthquake.

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    1. Carla - I really love this photo of Gabbi. I have a few more from our shoot.

      I am feeling time is similar to those phenomena you mentioned. I think it is a strange energy type that is a unique and little-know dimension. Even though light is not matter, I feel its heat. I feel time as well.

      There is only one a few moments when time stops for me. The first is when I am under anesthesia. The second is during the last few minutes or so of sex.

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  3. Karl, thank you for another inspiring post. I am writing about "Holiday Time," a concept from the critical theories surrounding Shakespeare's work.

    This post is another one of those phrasings you loft my way - complex, profound, abstract but worth trying to pin down. Time and light (energy) indeed are the most powerful and profound entities in human existence - perhaps also darkness, and we have a trinity.

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So,what are you thinking about?