That’s A Lot Of Minutes

Yesterday, at 2:14 AM PST, the Little Prince turned two.

That’s 2 full revolutions around the sun.

8 seasons.

24 months.

730 days.

17,520 hours.

1,051,200 minutes.

That’s a lot of minutes…

Time is an interesting thing.  It’s a constant that never feels as solid or certain as it should.  It speeds up and slows down, zooms along and drags out.  And, all too often, it does the opposite of what we want it to do.  Time is mysterious like that, elusive, and more than a little rude.

As mind blowing as it is to ponder that my child has now made the long journey around the sun twice, the simple, rhetorical question that immediately follows, “where did the time go,” does not really do justice to the achievements, triumphs, struggles, tears, giggles, scraped knees, lost sleep, smudged faces, sprouted teeth, words, fails, falls, spills, slips, jumps, laughs, grins, and on and on and on.

By necessity, we over simplify time.  We don’t have the time to truly grasp time.  We have to see it in general terms because if we attempted to get into the specifics of its passing, and what that passing means to us, we would lose ourselves in the process.  And yet, we still allow the concept to govern most of what we do.  When we wake up, when we go to work, how long we stay at work, when we eat our meals, how long we brush our teeth, when we get ready for bed, how long we sleep, how long we play, how long we talk on the phone, how long we spend on social media, how long we study, how long we party…  We break our days into little buckets of time, compartmentalized, so we can assess whether or not we are taking proper advantage of our time.

I’m not out to trivialize how we process time.  I am, however, fascinated by how quickly we try to denote its passing in arbitrary amounts to break it down to something we can understand.

The Little Prince is so much more than just a 2 year old, than just a human who has been on the Earth as it orbited the sun twice.  I’m all for celebrating that milestone, as silly as it is (since he’s actually be on Earth nearly ¾ of a year longer than that, if we want to be specific about it, and aside from that, it seems odd to be celebrating a random day based on the relative positions of this planet and its sun), but, aren’t there better ones we could be celebrating?

Happy all your baby teeth are in day?

Happy you spoke your first word day?

Happy you took your first unassisted step day?

Kneeling at her side, holding her hand, I watched the Queen give birth to the Little Prince at home, so trust me when I say that I understand what a big deal being born is.  I’m not taking anything away from that.  Birth days are amazing and important and very worthy of being celebrated.  In a very rambling and disjointed way, I’m just trying to get us to look at how we rationalize our usage of time, and start a discussion on what is and isn’t really important to notice, monitor, celebrate, etc…

Do you have your normal days broken into specific time buckets?  Are those of your own choosing or forced upon you by work and other responsibilities?

What is one anniversary you don’t think is worth celebrating anymore?  What is one anniversary you’d like to see celebrated that isn’t?

Rather than breaking the Earth’s daily rotations into hours, minutes, and seconds, how would you like to mark time’s progression?

Did this post make any sense at all?  I wrote it, and I’m not sure that it did…