Gravity of time (day 124)

I saw my friend Yutai today.  He was visiting from San Francisco with his girlfriend.  Many of us met at a pub to see him.  Looking around the table it struck me how we are all aging.  That's what happens when you only see people every few years.  It's as if the context of the friendship stays frozen and the realization of change is a cosmic joke tinged with sadness. 

Sitting around the table looking at everyone and hearing the plans everyone has to say goodbye to the decade, I remembered how ten years ago saying goodbye to the decade had been a much more even mixture of hello and goodbye.   True it's hard to compete with a new millenium but this year has also had quite a lot of bad news on a global level.  Who could blame us for not being super positive about the year ahead and for not wanting to think in ten year terms.  Not one person asked about New Year's resolutions.

Yutai claims this year has been 42% less fun.  Surely that's reason for hope for next year and a reason to look for ways to brighten someone's day.

A nostalgic song for this post.

What you don't know (day 44)

Apparently when we go to sleep we forget most of what happened during our day.  Only the unusual gets stored in a way that can be recalled in more details.  The rest gets absorbed and reinforces certain patterns or inhibits them.  The point is that we think we know what happened yesterday but we're missing big chunks.  This gets worse as time goes on.  We have very little recall of what happened last week and even less last month and last year.    There was a book written recently that talks about why life speeds up as we age.  One of the points mentioned was the repetition of pattern with less new or unusual stimulation.  The older you get, the more you've done and seen, and the harder it is to stimulate the brain to create a new memory.   Memories are intimately linked with time perception.  They also mention the fact that a year when you're 60 is not the same as a year when you're 4.  One is 1/60th of a life lived, the other is a quarter.   I'm not sure I buy that argument for life speeding up but it's a worth a reflection.   I know that the older I get the more paranoid I am about what I'm not perceiving either deliberately or through forgetfulness or just plain physiology.  I think about a certain mood I was in a few weeks back and it seems so foreign, like another person.   Yet I know it will happen again.  I'm puzzled by the contrast between immediate control and long term uncertainty.

If you know french, Jacques Languirand spoke about the book mentioned above on his show Par Quatres Chemins.

A song for this post.