Time

Time ...

Where does it go? … Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of starting my blog. Well … technically the 17th is the one year mark of the first post, but it didn’t exactly say much of anything so I don’t really count it as the first post … it was more of a place holder.

Of course, the blog didn’t start off here on blogger, rather it started over on the guild portal blog site, and was mirrored there for a while after I moved over here to blogger. So, why did I move it in the first place? Simple really, the blogger site was part of the Scales of Pain guild site, and since I wasn’t talking about things relating to EQII I really didn’t feel right keeping my rants over there, so we ended up here.

And it’s been a good home too … comfy and welcoming. Certainly in the time I’ve been posting here I’ve never really had any problems. I’ve had a few friendly comments and shared my thoughts on a variety of subjects over the year past. Hopefully you have at least enjoyed the journey through some of the caverns of my mind. I think I’ve shown you at least a few gems mixed in with the coal and general detritus.

Looking back to that post on December 20th, 2004 (It’s the Holiday Season…) I have to say that I still agree with everything I said then. I might have said it differently had I written it today, but I think the sentiment would be the same.

In fact … looking back up the Word document that I’ve written all of this down in I have written 87 pages of rants, over 44,000 words. Not all of them have been as well organized as I would have liked, and in fact I think some of them failed to get the point that I was going for across … though I have a feeling that I got something across in all of them.

If I’ve offended you … oh well … you’ll live. After all … if you keep coming back and reading then I have to assume that SOMETHING interested you in what I have to say, and that means that there’s hope that I’ll get you thinking about things. That is, after all my main goal. I truly feel that it is a disturbing lack of thought that causes a great many of the problems in the world. Or, more accurately, a lack of ability to think about things logically, or a tendency to place importance on personal issues rather than important issues … to think long term.

“No, this is just personal. Personal’s not the same as important, people just think it is.” –Terry Pratchett “Lords and Ladies”

Over the year I have often quoted … though I think that’s the first time I’ve quoted Pratchett … quotes are the sound bites of print … a way for me to say what I’m trying to say, probably in a more articulate way than I would manage on my own. More often than not, anything I want to say has already been said better by someone else.

But really … where does the time go? I can hardly believe that it’s been 12 months gone already. I swear they don’t make months like they used to … there was a time when I could get stuff done in a month … when a month was a significant amount of time. Now … it seems hardly more than a week … or a day … you turn around and *poof* another month has passed and you’re left wondering where in the devil it went.

Some people say time is relative to age … the older you are the less significant a month or year is … when you’re 5 years old 1 year is 1/5th, or 20%, of your life … when you’re 35 years old 1 year is 1/35th, or 0.286%, of your life. The older you get the less significant time itself becomes, but the more important it becomes to you.

Another likely part of the equation is that as you get older, and become an adult with adult responsibilities, your life becomes busier. There are more demands on your time … work, play, sleep, family, friends, hobbies … as your life fills up with things to do and as you get caught up in doing them you stop paying attention to the time slipping away around you … and then one day you come to find, 10 years have got behind you, no one told you when to run … erm … sorry about that … couldn’t resist…

Time itself is an illusion … mankind forcing measurement on the series of events that make up life. We aren’t happy if there is something that we can’t find a way to measure and quantify. We slice it into little bite size chunks so that we can better handle it … we don’t have to consider the eternity of time, we need merely worry about the next second, or next minute, or hour, or day … and there was the trap we laid for ourselves. We ceased to look to the future, ceased to think about what may be … in favor of looking at the now, we act on what seems good now … often without consideration to what effects it may have in the future.

In any case, however, together we have completed the first cycle of this blog … With a bit of luck it will just be the first of many.

[In case any of you are wondering … no, I didn’t have any point to this rant … I was just writing what came to mind ... hopefully you got some entertainment out of the ramblings of my thought process … if not, I hope I didn’t bore you too badly.]