Time

Here in Perth, we've finally completed our second cycle of Daylight Savings. Clocks have gone back an hour, assisting our transition into Winter. On the weekend it was bright and sunny.

Today it's raining cats and dogs. On steroids. Winter is truly here.

But what interests me is how we adults are affected by time. Time is, in itself, a very interesting "thing".

Time in nature exists as the following:

Sunrise. Noon. Sunset. Twilight.

Changing of Seasons.

Waxing and waning of the Moon and Tidal changes.

For us, time affects us like trees that get rings as they grow older - our body and appearance change as we grow older.

But beyond those things, time has no real "value" - its hard to quantify time from a layman's point of view.

Oh, we can look at it as seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenia, aeons, but those are all man-made concepts. Those are things we've created in order to allow us to record events that have happened and to date them.

From a child's point of view, time has no real meaning. You wake up, you eat, you play, you eat some more, you nap, you play some more and then you go to bed. At some point, around the age of seven, you become self-aware. At that point, time 'requires' meaning. You begin to realise that your working parent(s) is away some days and not away other days; those days being weekends. The adult world creeps into your child life and imposes values.

But what if those values didn't impose themselves? What if all concepts of time ceased. If there were no work days and weekends, if there were no clocks or watches to check timetables?

Would we 'miss' time?