time – Clear Word Drops

I hate waiting. You know what I mean.

Well, maybe not exactly.

I hate passive waiting.

Passively waiting – especially when you have to – means you are dependent on what’s out of your control. Waiting for your friend on the street to go to a movie together. Waiting for the train to come. Waiting for the end of a deadly boring meeting.

I don’t want to. But I have to. Because I want to get to the end of that waiting, for there’s going to be something else I really want.

Time slows down when you count it, when you watch it.

I can pass through the waiting time somehow, by reading a Blinkist book, listening to Podcasts, or counting red cars/dogs/how many times I think about “OMG”…

These things may make me feel better. But they don’t stop me from hating passive waiting.

I do like active waiting though.

It’s not really “expecting”. That would mean that you know what’s coming.

But actively waiting for something means for me like this:

You prepare for it. You work for it. You are conscious about your choices and steps.

You hope for something good to happen by the end of the waiting time. But you know so well that it might not turn out to be how you want it to be.

The best part?

It’s ok anyway.

Why?

Because you enjoy working for it.

Your joy comes from doing, despite the current situation where you are in is not great, you are still full of joy.

Even if you are soaked in difficult things around you, or pain in your heart, you know there’s an end to all of that.

There IS an end on the other side of the tunnel. You KNOW it.

But you actively working on making the light at the end come faster, and shine brighter.

That’s the active waiting I like. And I’m doing it right now.

Perception of Time
Is it really like we always say, today in this capitalist world, we are so occupied that don’t have time to socialise, don’t have time to leisure. What has changed in our life comparing to hundreds years ago? Has humans’ perception of time changed?

In the era of internet, do we have more time to social or less? If we should call communicating with others online as being socialising?

Using internet contains always, and only information input and/or output. News reading, movie/video watching are mostly input process. Writing Emails is counted as the newest form of writing letters. Writing instant messages can happen at the same time when you do other things or a single thing you do. You can also writing messages with several people at the same time. People can group chat. Isn’t it “hanging out”? Some video chatting with friends and families for hours, or watching the same TV programs while skypping, just like they are “hanging out” and spending time with them. Can’t all of these activities be consider as “socialising”?

Has internet changed the meaning of “social”?
If one talks about “social space”, most young people today would instantly think of the virtual social space. “Social networks” as they call it. On Google plus, one can add friends’ accounts into his own “circle”, and then one can see if they are online, if so, ask them if they want to “hang out”.

i think, whether or not an activity can be called socialising should be defined by how the participants feel, instead of how it looks like, how “weird” it might be. Feeling is always a tricky and unrecognised way to define and to measure. But isn’t it an ultimate criteria or everything we do? Maybe this is a possible topic for sociologists and phycologists, to find out how we can develop a system to measure if we are “feeling” ourselves socialising, as if we can’t tell by ourselves.

Coming back to perception of time, I believe, if we modern humans carefully count how much time we devoted into professional tasks or studies, the truth is, not so much as we imagined. Working from 9 to 17 is 8 hours in total. If 8 hours sleeping time not calculated, we still have 8 hours to do whatever we can and want — socialising, meditating, eating (for some who say them being too busy to eat), exercising, and reading and writing.

But why don’t we feel the 8 hours? Comparing to Bengali men sitting everyday 5 hours together and chatting, we live in a seemingly much stressful way.

In fact, we still have the 8 hours, but we only have them as small pieces, instead of hours of time chunk as people have living in pre-modernity.

Urbanisation of cities make people spend more and more time on transportation. So much junk and useless information on the internet and television distract us every day for one or two ours. involuntarily and voluntarily we give away so much time a day. And still feeling lack of time.

We are living in a completely different world than our ancestors. They faced big chunk of time a day, from dawn to dawn. Later, specialisation of labour re-decided the world’s resource distribution; while for individuals, specialising certain activities and distributing them into small sections of time is a favoured way to solve this problem.

Tag: time

Active Waiting