Having a year of your life back

[box] This column is normally reserved for comment on local issues, but occasionally it will also be used for short thoughts about every day life. This is one of those occasions. [/box]

 

SHORT THOUGHTS

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #ABCCAB;”] T [/dropcap]he end of daylight saving caught me by surprise this year and when I learnt, after waking at 8am, that it was really only 7am, I realised that I had an hour of my life back.

And it felt delicious.

It was as if I had been given the most extraordinary gift, even though daylight saving is, of course, an entirely manufactured concept, as is the measuring of time itself.

While thinking about all of the ways I could spend my “extra” hour, I also thought about how ridiculously fast our lives have become. I did not meet one person this week, or last week, or even the week before that, who wasn’t “busy”, and that includes myself.

“How are you?”

“Ohhh, you know, so busy!”

All of the time-saving devices we now have that our parents (read: mothers) used to dream about have not freed up our lives at all: we just cram more in.

I can remember, and I laugh about it now, learning in first-year Sociology way back in 1983 how we would all have so much leisure time on our hands by the year 2000 that sociologists were worried about how we would keep ourselves busy.

 

 

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #ABCCAB;”] W[/dropcap]ell here we are in 2014 – 14 years after we were all supposed to be sitting poolside – and there is not a minute, it seems, when we don’t have anything to do. Worse, the arrival of mobile technology has given us a 24-hour “on” button, together with an expectation that we are always available.

It is absolutely exhausting and makes us all feel frazzled.

So I began to ponder what it would be like if we didn’t just get an hour “back”, but a whole year. Imagine that. Even better, imagine if you got to choose which year you could have all over again.

I would choose a year when my faithful old dog was still young instead of in her last days – as she is now – and when my father was still alive and my older brother too, because even though they have both been gone a long time, I still miss them like it was yesterday.

Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.

They all seem to speed by. Except for today. Today the world, or at least our corner of it, slowed down by one exquisite hour.

How I wish I could make that happen every day.