Why do clocks exist? We wanted to measure time. We wanted to quantify something to standardize it. To make everything on a schedule on the micro scale. Which in turn led to making everything on a schedule on the macro scale.
Hmm. What was there before words? Only feelings. You couldn't express your emotions as words. But feelings are one of the few things that are real. We wanted to measure how we felt. But the realest and deepest feelings are indescribable. We can try to define and describe it, but it can't be explained, only experienced. So clocks are to time what words are to feelings.
We emphasize time management and rightfully so. But feeling management, thought management, emotion management, much less prevalent. But just as important. Time is much more concrete and discrete than feelings, so we give priority to that. Because we can quantify them.
We think that feelings are a function of time. That you have X feelings for Y amount of time. And that could very well be true. But I think the inverse is just as true. That time is a function of feelings. How much time passes is dictated by how you feel. An hour doing something you love flies by. An hour doing something you don't like can feel like an eternity. So it's all about measuring those feelings. If I can have a feeling of happiness, time will go by much quicker because I'm doing what I like, because I'm inherently happy.
Why then do people want to live longer when they're not happy in the life they're living? That makes 0 sense lol. "Are you happy? No. So you want to have a longer life filled with unhappiness?" The paradox is that when you're in that state of happiness, time goes by quicker, hence life goes by quicker. The people who don't complain about time are the happiest people. From the outside it looks like they have more time to do what they want, hence they're happier. But actually, they understand true happiness and live life from that state of happiness. They transcend time. They're not searching for time here and there. Time will get created from that place of happiness. Can you measure that happiness? No. This quote has gone around and I think I believe(d) it. At least until now: "What gets measured gets managed." You measure the revenue, you'll manage the revenue. You measure the customer retention, you can manage the customer retention. Those statements make sense on the surface. But they're only true in this 'reality' that we've created. We just said you can't measure happiness. Does that mean you can't manage happiness? Lol nah.
But how do you measure the immeasurable? You don't. You simply experience it.
We've been trained to believe that if we can't measure it, then it's not real. That's the rational, scientific part of us trying to comprehend life. That if we can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it, then it's not real. Ok, so let's say you do include experience and feelings in that way of 'proving' something. What then? Feelings are not as absolute or discrete. They're relative, fluid, on a spectrum. A number scale is the simplest way to simulate that spectrum. So we have 1-10 or 1-100 scales to approximate how we feel.
OH! The answer was right in front of me the whole time! Instead of a number scale to approximate happiness, you can measure it by how fast you feel time going by. Not just happiness, but any feeling.
What then of the scenarios when you feel a day go by quickly buy you feel tired, exhausted at the end of it? I think the issue there is balance and misidentifying the underlying feeling. Feeling tired and exhausted is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a positive sign. It's your body telling you that you need to engage in something that will help restore balance.
Is it possible to feel a day go by quickly doing things you don't like? I think we'll associate that end feeling of being tired and exhausted to not having done stuff we liked throughout the day. But if we look at it, if it did actually seem like a day went by quickly, the actual process of completing the task or whatever it is unlocked some state of happiness / flow / immersion.
Ok, I'm actually going to turn off / hide my physical clock in my living room from now on. It's a symbol for me following the brules of society. If I want my management of feelings to improve, I have to fully embrace being guided by my feelings. I won't let the clock tell me what time to slee, what time to go to work, what time to wake up, etc. All I have to do is simply feel. Just like a bland person's sense of hearing and touch getting more acute when they have no sight, I can approach it in a similar fashion. To heighten and enhance my feeling management, I can remove my sense of human-constructed time. And to measure my overall feelings throughout the day, I can add a metric to my List Journal like Day Speed. 0 being slow and 100 being extremely quick.
But that's just measuring time as a function of feeling. What about measuring feeling as a function of time? Anything as a function of time is usually best represented as a graph, with x-axis as time. So maybe I'll start drawing out my days to represent the feelings I have. Eventually, if I said words are ways to describe feelings, then having words represent points on that graph will give me a way to represent my feelings throughout a day.
Well that was a journaling session that lasted 90 min but felt like it went by much quicker. 😉
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