All entries for Sunday 29 January 2006

Timelines

The other day, I was talking to my flatmate Niki at dinner when she asked, "So, when you think of time, how do you think of it?". Needless to say, I was a bit confused by this statement coming à propos of nothing, so I asked her to explain more fully. She then asked, how did I picture time, in terms of days, weeks, months and years. What's strange is that I knew just how to answer her. When I think of a year, I think of it going like this…

April —————————————————> December

———————————————————————-

l

l

l

January

Starting at the bottom (January, obviously), and taking a sharp right at April. This means that I guess my life looks like a staircase, which I just spent 10 minutes drawing out in underscores and l's, but which blogbuilder won't let me show. angry face (well, not so much angry as ever so slightly bemused. You get the idea…)

Which is nice, now I think about it, it's like my years are climbing towards something, even in the literal way that I think of them. I'd never considered that before.

Niki, on the other hand, thinks of her years as being a kind of upright oval, going anti-clockwise downwards towards June and then up towards December. As for weeks and the progession of each month, she thinks of each week as progressing in a linear fashion from right to left . Obviously, this clearly proves her to be insane, but that's another topic for discussion entirely. When I think of a week, it moves from left to right, and when I think of a day it climbs vertically towards midnight, then kind of drops off in a curve down to the bottom at 6 a.m.

So, I mentioned this to some friends (two of which philiosophy majors) and none of them were able to elucidate how they think about time. So now I would like to know if Niki and I are, in fact, confirmed crazies, or if there are other people who have considered this… thank you for your time given in this groundbreaking piece of research.

: 29 Jan 2006 18:37 |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem