I think the “essay” part of this essay is going to be relatively short, not because it’s simple or I haven't put much thought into it but because the point I wish to put across is quite a short one, yet one that still warrants a blog post because I feel like it can have incredibly important impacts on our perspectives (it certainly has mine). So in this blog I want to discuss time… time and how it is something we just… made up.
Okay let me clarify. Time isn’t made up, the indefinite continued progress of existence and events is not something that humans could have made up, instead we exist within it. Time is a complicated subject and one that I can imagine I will explore much more on this blog. The time that we made up, that I want to focus on, is the division of time; seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months, and most focally for this essay, years.
These divisions of time are in the grand scheme of time exceptionally small divisions that allow us to count its passing, to track it as it goes, but more importantly it allows us to comprehend the passing of time as smaller chunks of information rather than having to comprehend all of time at once.
Divisions of Time are Useful
Imagine the situation where you are meeting a friend, but humans have not invented the words or even the concepts of seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. If they wanted to know what had happened before you had met up then usually they would ask you “how was your week?” yet in this situation they do not have the words to ask that and therefore may ask you “How were you before?” do they expect you to rattle off every part of your existence that has happened since you last met? What if they were a childhood friend and you haven't seen them for 17 years do they really want you to explain all of those seventeen years in chronological order just as what is normally considered small talk? Probably not. It's too large of a portion of time. It would take so long to explain all of that, but more importantly it would be so hard for us to be able to comprehend all of that information as one large chunk of information. Instead we ask how was your week (a small chunk of information), and if you were to meet a childhood friend that really did want your life story then it is probably easier for you to break down that large chunk of time into smaller more understandable segments using months and years.
I agree there are many different ways for someone to ask you how your week was; how have you been, what have you been up to? These sorts of questions without any divisions of time become difficult to understand. The specificity of the question is not clear. Without the division of time, these alternative questions are difficult to clearly understand and would rely much more on context than those that we have with our current dictionary.
Additionally, time allows us to comprehend specifics. My grandad had a heart attack (this will be touched on more later in this blog) two years ago, so I've had time to process it, and most of my friends understand that it has been a significant proportion of time since it happened and therefore understand how to appropriately discuss it with me. Doing this becomes increasingly difficult without a concept of the division of time.
A New Year? Or the next notation to mark the passage of time.
You get my point, we made up the divisions of time because they help us understand things (there are other reasons but I don’t wish to waffle on). Yet, the helpfulness that these concepts provide do not make them any more or any less made up, time as a natural phenomenon is the entire passing of all events, but time as a measurement is made up.
My understanding of these above points has sort of left me unable to truly enjoy a new year. I’ve always thought of the new year as an excuse; an excuse to get drunk with friends and hug each other when the clock on the wall says a certain time, an excuse to forget all the bad things that you can and put them down as “last year”, but I have never seen new year as meaningful in any major way and i most definitely haven’t seen it as something new. To me there was no difference between December 31st and January 1st apart from the number I had to use to record that specific division of time. Writing this now it sort of sounds depressing, but I promise you it's not, I always loved new years, but until the beginning of this year I had always been missing something about it that I think is very important.
Sure the divisions are made up, but they are made up by us, humans. Information, understanding and thinking is our key thing, it's the stuff that helped us evolve and I would also argue that it's a significant part of what it means to be human. So these changes, these shifts from one measurement of time to another isn’t meaningless, but rather it is part of the human experience and ability to compartmentalise and to create these cultural blank slates. These blank slates may not be real naturally but they are real to us. The New Year is a beginning and marks the end of one chunk of time into an understandable amount of information (a year).
This sort of brings me to my point. Allowing ourselves a blank slate is liberating, like walking on fresh snow, it gives us a sense of being able to make our steps, our future, the next chunk, whatever we want it to be. But also it means that the last year is finished, a nice understandable complete section of time, that upon reflection can be used to really think about what we value in life and about how we want to spend our time.
Don’t let the past haunt you but remember it, use it to your advantage. Go get this new year, go do the shit you love and push through the tough times with your loved ones. Forget about yesterday because tomorrow is a new day, untarnished and fresh, do your best and love it if you can, but if not, there's always another blank slate after it.
What the New Year gave me
Here now I wish to take you on a slight tangent, the point of the essay is pretty much over so if you do not wish to continue then you won’t miss much; just my personal experiences that led me to thinking of the idea for this essay and an explanation of my life and its impact on this blog.
Disclaimer! Before I start I do wish to say that I am going to be reflecting on my year, and to do that effectively I am going to explain these situations as I felt them. There are many things that are so horrific in the world and I am privileged enough to be sheltered from all of them, and by no means do I wish anyone reading this to think that I am trying to gather sympathy, portray myself hard done by, or even boast about the situation I am in. I do know how lucky I am, but instead I wish to reflect, to analyse my year in all its glories and discomforts
2022 was one hell of a year for me, as I am sure it was for a lot of other people. It was the first year that had begun to feel normal since the strangeness of the Covid Pandemic, but at the start of the year I was in a good place.
My mentality was due to the unfortunate situation caused by the Covid-19 virus because honestly, I have to say that I thrived in the lockdowns. I was in a small house with very close friends and I was able to spend the time taking a second; re-assessing myself and my life, and changing the things which I wanted to improve upon. I didn’t take up coding, or learn to mine bit-coins, but instead because life had become so small it highlighted the day to day toughness that had plagued me without me even noticing in the mad rush of normal life. I’m thankful in a way that I had this time, that almost felt like a pause in life, because as it passed by (with no obvious end coming closer) I felt more and more grounded in life and in myself.
So when in the beginning of 2022 everything was more or less back to normal I was in a much better headspace and I was, for the first time in my life, beginning to look at myself deeply and like where I was.
The beginning of 2022 that led up to and followed my graduation was an incredible year for me; I completed my degree, I established plans for the future, and I met some of the most amazing life long friends. I do not want to deceive you dearest reader; not every day was a walk in the park, things were still challenging as many things are, but being in the significantly better place after COVID made it easier for me to take each step in life as it came and after a tough few years in my life I felt that finally I was firmly buckled in to the rollercoaster of life.
The rest of 2022 would change that.
University was over and my plans for future life had begun. I had moved into a new house with some friends from uni and I was ready to take the year and begin to chase my dreams. My mother and I had plans for a business; ones that if they worked would allow my family a security that we had not had since my parents divorce back in 2011. In order to finalise these plans, I travelled back home in some spare time that I had just to grab some documents and other things that I would need. Sometimes I think that if I had not decided to go home, where would I be right now? Would I be in a better position or would things be significantly worse off for me and the people I love? Well anyway, upon returning home I was greeted by letters, letters which explained the significant debt that my Grandad was now in.
Here I must backtrack a little. In between the two lockdowns, I had decided to meet a friend, who I had not seen for a while (for obvious reasons that were apparently not obvious to those who ran our country at the time) and I received a call from my father. My Dad and I talk on the phone all the time so it was not unusual for me to get such a call, and I answered and expected a quick conversation about how I was currently out with a friend and that I would call him another time for a chat, but immediately I knew something was up. I could sense it in the tone of his voice. It was the same tone of voice he had used before I watched my Grandmother die.
My Grandad had had a heart attack. He had been taken to hospital and was recovering so there was nothing to panic about but my dad just wanted me to know. I had lived with my grandad since 2016 so he and I had developed such a strong relationship, which he didn’t really have with anyone else in the family (he is a man of few words, a typical old English gentleman, all positive and all flaws). It was before the academic year had begun so I travelled back to see him. He was not in a good condition and ended up having a stroke after the surgery to fix his heart. He pushed through, but since then he has been unable to care for himself, he’s been in a round the clock nursing home.
With my grandad out of the house, my old home was empty but I was at university and therefore wanted to rent it out to provide some income to pay for my Grandad's care. Instead my mother and her partner moved in with my sister and step-sister. That was how it was for an entire year until I convinced my mother that we should probably look to use the house as a source of income and our business plans began.
So I return to that fateful day where I returned home to finalise plans and was greeted with mountains of debt. It turns out that my mother had been unable to handle her own finances let alone my grandads and therefore had not been paying any money to the care home for many months. This ruined our plans for the business and sent my life down a path for the last 6 months of 2022 that I could have never predicted.
I advised my mother that she should move out, because the house for her had become a horrible nightmare wrapped up in a building. She did and I was left to sort the mess.
My life became talking to solicitors, talking to debt collectors, scrapping from the bottom of the barrel just to pay to have the heating on, and all this in the midst of an economic crisis that has not been seen in my lifetime.
I’m nearly done, I’ve cleared the house of everything that is not of sentimental value, I have solicitors managing the legal side of things and an estate agent trying to sell the house to clear the debt. I have to say it’s not really the most fun situation I’ve ever been in and it has really changed my life in ways that even now I cannot foresee.
So the new year came.
As I said, in the above essay, new year was not meaningful to me but was rather just an extremely fun and sociable night with my loved ones (so meaningful in a different way). This year however was different. I didn’t go to a large party, I didn’t have the money or more frankly the energy. Instead I spent it with my sister, with a bottle of cheap sparkling white wine and video games. It was nice and it was simple. And after the countdown I went to bed and had some time to let my overthinking brain spin (see my previous blog).
I went over the year as a whole, a single year is quite comprehensible as I previously mentioned opposed to the undivided behemoth of all time that has ever passed, so I was able to do it quite easily with the aid of a pen and paper. I looked at the things that went well and I looked at the things that I enjoyed. I looked at the things that I'd struggled with and how I'd managed to cope (or why I didn’t cope very well). At first it was just to commend myself on navigating a situation that was completely out of my depth, but quickly I realised that I had organised my year into a very neat (albeit very reductive and simplistic) table.
It was at this point where I felt that the new year seemed as if it were a blank slate, one that humans had created, but still one that was meaningful and useful, and in a way, for me at least cleansing as I reminded myself about what I want to do in life and about what I value and that this new year was an opportunity to do my best to realise it.
I made a plan for myself, I'm not good at following plans so it was simple; do more of these, do less of these. It wasn’t a New Years resolution but rather just a reminder about how i love living life and how I want to do it.
I was and still am in a very strange and tough situation that my friends or anyone around me cannot really relate to because they’ve never been in this situation, it is so complicated and intertwined that I think maybe only I can fully and completely understand. But despite my difficult position that does not mean I cannot enjoy life, I just needed to give myself some reminders to help me along the way.
The World is weird people, but life was made for living!
See you when I’m looking at you,
with Love Tom
P.S before I go, 2 things.
Yes this blog was like a few hours late (i was in the hospital with my Grandad all week), but as part of my things to do this year I want to post consistently on this blog, so i will be posting on every last day of the month this year.
This post is quite “self-helpy” , that was not my intention, life can suck and not everything has to be used to improve yourself, some things just suck. Rather I just wanted to express my thoughts on the subject and how they have helped me in a very strange position in my life.
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