Day 155

'How longs it been?' Pen on Paper

Following on from yesterday, in terms of reflecting on the past, there is a question that is often uttered or pondered when something has been absent from our life for any particular stretch of time, that being, 'How longs it been?' It happens when we bump into someone we haven't seen in a long time, when we think about the last time we were in a particular place and even the last time we quaffed a certain beverage or scoffed a certain foodstuff. In what ever parameters that it comes about we then spend the immediate moments after involved in recollecting multiple memories and stories that are supposedly connected yet somehow fairly disjointed in order to approximate the date, day and time of the particular event. The type of circumstances we link to the more specific memory that we are recalling range from the time a specific song was on the radio to the time someone did something idiotic to the time when you favourite musician/actor/sports personality won/did something significant. The links are normally pretty tenuous to say the least but are none the less amassed together in order to more accurately pinpoint the exact instance that the event occurred. The thing is though that the nature of the series of events we have chosen to string together is that they are practically unrelated, other than the fact that we believe them to have happened at a similar time. Essentially then we are trying to give a specific time frame for an event to have happened, solely based on a series of disjointed and unrelated events that again we cant really be sure as to the exact time that they happened. Our perception of time then in these moments is anything but accurate in terms of how long it actually has been, however one thing is unmistakeable we never forget how it feels to experience that event again. Whilst our perception of time can become diluted or blurred, our senses are not fooled as easily meaning that whilst we may not be able to recall the exact time that something happened we can't forget how it made us feel. As a result the value of time is relegated to being secondary, so when we ask ourselves 'how long it has been' it's not really about the actuality of the span of time that has passed. Instead it is more about trying to express the scale of the void caused by not experiencing the emotion or sensory overload caused by that exact stimulus or situation last time round.