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Thursday, February 28, 2013

86,400 seconds

I just read a post on Google+ about time, about how to use it and not lose it. The post is at http://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-are-you-using-your-86400-seconds/ .
It is an interesting viewpoint of your life and your time, but it goes against how I think and look at things. Pretty much I have a chaotic Zen view of life. Not chaotic as in no structure, but chaotic as in the chaos butterfly, where every action causes other actions which affects everything around it and eventually in some way, the entire world. Now the flapping of the wings of a butterfly probably has no affect on a monsoon in China, but it does cause a reaction from a distraction of a passing creature, or the spread of pollen, or something else that causes a new cause and effect. It is one of Newton's Laws, and also can be seen in karma, and the law of 3, but mostly these reactions are either instantaneous, or long term effects. How long it takes can be quantified, but not limited by the clock.
Most of my life I have been in the food business. Most of that in pizza shops. Each day was different, although there are trends that you find when you have been doing it over a long period of time. You know that it will be busy over lunch time, and over traditional dinner time, but you don't know how busy until it happens. You know that Thursday and Friday are busy. You know that weekends follow a different “clock”. This is all reactions to outside sources from the work schedule, their payday, and external societal influences. If there is some sort of event scheduled near by, it may either bring people to you or take them away. You can make educated guesses, but you don't know until it actually happens. Working in this part of the business, you go with the flow, and learn to change course as needed to get the order out, although another part of the job is preparation, and stocking which both depends on past history, and future expectation, and is more structured and less spur of the moment.
As to time and the clock, I tend to live my life on a rolling schedule, put into the structured time frame of a job, and social and family interactions, but also flowing freely inside these constraints. I have times I sleep 3 hours, and times I sleep 12 hours. Depending on my work and what others are doing and when, I may have an entire day free to do what I want, or have only minutes for myself. But I've learned to take those minutes, and use them when I can. My entertainment tends to be on demand as even with tv and movies I tend to watch it either from my computer or online via Netflix or other video sites. I can even stop time in a show, go take care of business of the moment and then come back and continue from where I stopped.
An analogy that came to mind is baseball. You have each individual pitch, you don't know what the pitcher will throw or if it will be swung on or what the result will be. That may take a second or two. Then you have the plate appearance that may be a single pitch or theoretically an infinite number of pitches. That can take a couple of seconds up to minutes e(specially if the pitching coach or manager goes to the mound or there is a pitching change). Next is the inning. 3 outs per side, 6 outs if you count both teams chances at bat. Depending on the results of the plate appearances, and other occurrences, they may take mere minutes, or what may seem like hours. Then the game itself. In games with younger players it is usually a 6 inning game. In those with mid teens it may be 7 innings. In the games among older teens and adults it goes to 9 innings. Of course the game may go into extra innings if it is tied after the completion of each full inning, until one team or the other finally wins. That may be a quick game if low scoring, and may be 2, 3, or 4 hours, some have gone on further but that is rare. Each game can be part of a series or tournament, which can last a couple of days, or weeks like the play-offs of the MLB, or it can be part of the season, which in MLB is 6 months, and that doesn't include the couple months of spring training in preparation of the season. The analogy that I am brining up with this is that even with each of these parts has structure, the whole is a compilation of actions and reactions, that do not take time into consideration. Each game is pleasurable in it's own way, as a 1 to 0 pitcher dual or a 15 to 14 home run fest. If I am worried about how long it is taking, I lose out on the enjoyment.
I live each day and enjoy every second that I can, trying as best not to allow the outside influences affect me too much. But I don't worry about whether I was affected, except as to how it pertains to my next minute. For the most part I am even tempered because I live second to second, minute to minute, day to day, and try not to let anything but this moment in time affect me. Whether I have 1 day, or 12 hours or 720 minutes, or 86,400 seconds, it all flows, on into the next day, so that I don't worry about filling the next second or minute, or day. I just let it flow.

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