by C. Mackenzie

Created on: December 10, 2007

It's the paths I didn't walk. The doors I didn't open; the words I never said; the eyes I couldn't lock. It's the desert to trek to get where we will and the sandbox to play in when we get there. It's water in a bucket that doesn't drip from the bottom but evaporates from the top, skimming away layer by indiscernible layer of possibilities; of the 'should have's' and the 'could have been's'. It's the rhythm of a childlike dance spun by a small blue rock in a lonesome, cold, and starry vacuum. It's the baseline measurement of our lifespans; of our worlds.

Time is lost and wasted and killed. We spend half our waking days at work, or an hour in a waiting room. We usher our children to and from extra-curricular 'resume-building' activities; after-school sports, karate, music lessons, dance classes. We budget our schedules to milk every minute for what it's worth. We constructed time to master our lives, but has mastery been achieved? We know how far and fast we can drive with what gas is in our cars; how long we can go between meals based on what we ate.

The ticking of the second hand, the flicking of the minute hand; the baseline measurements of our existence - carefully illustrated and annotated. We'd be lost without a sense of the hour. We fight to regulate time lest it regulate us first. If we don't stay on top of things, then we're always hurrying from place to place. That makes us stressed, right?

Speaking generally, while a new stimuli initially elicits a response, an unchanging one will eventually become accepted. This is a behavioral phenomenon called habituation. Itchy tags on shirts will eventually stop itching - not because the itch goes away, but because the stimulus was constant and our brains ignored it. This could be said to apply beyond physical stimuli. When you begin a new job, you wake up earlier than usual and go into work feeling a little nervous and excited. Within a month or so, you've gotten into a consistent sleeping pattern, you're no longer nervous on the job, and you can take it with a grain of salt.

So what happens when our schedules don't change? We wake up, go to work, and come home. Take the kids to their respective appointments. Find something to eat, watch our favorite show for a bit, go to sleep. Add some slight variations per day, but when the week's over, all we've got to show for it is a very similar week before us. It indeed breeds task efficiency. But maybe what's stressing us isn't our perceived sense of task inefficiency.

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