Losing Time

Many years ago, when I used to work the graveyard shift, I would often listen to Art Bell’s nationwide Coast-to-Coast late night talk radio show. Usually straying from the political blather that plagues the talk radio scene, Bell instead concentrated on creating the picture of a world full of paranormal phenomena and unexplained mysteries. One of the recurring subjects was that of alien abductions. And one of the recurring features of that subject was the loss of time on the part of the "abducted".

Somebody would typically be hiking out in some God-forsaken part of some remote woods (in the night, of course) when they would awaken to find themselves either there or someplace else, a few hours to a few days later. With no recollection about their “lost time”. Others would commonly just go to bed at night and wake up much later, experiencing sporadic "flashbacks" of a traumatic experience involving aliens.

The idea that we can have blackouts in our memories that may hold sinister secrets has a certain appeal for those inclined to the mysterious. But in the real world (I don’t subscribe to the idea of alien abductions) people “lose time” often, without actually losing consciousness or memory. Only it isn’t some outside party like “grey” aliens with big eyes kidnapping them to a spaceship for biological experimentation. No, it’s people themselves who allow time to slip away from them. And I’m one of the biggest offenders! So, what am I going to do about this?

I’ve looked over my daily life a little and noticed a few things:

--I tend to stay up too late at night, when I am both physically and mental tired to really accomplish anything worthwhile. And then get up too late the next morning to accomplish the things I want to do before having to go to work in the afternoon.

--I have found myself sitting in front of my TV surfing channels when I already know that there isn’t anything good to watch.

--While cleaning up an area such as my garage, I often run across items that distract me from my task.

--Although going back and forth to the kitchen to get snacks to eat is often placed in the “dieting” category, it is also an example of losing time as well.

--Sometimes I will let myself get too distracted with puzzle-solving (like kakuro) instead of tackling less-pleasant-but-necessary tasks.

So there are a few examples (off the top of my head) of me letting time slip away. Why, this very morning I got up way too late, which is what brought this subject up for me to write about. I have too many things going on in my life and in that of my family for me to be careless about how I use my time. I’ve written about this problem of mine a while back on this blog, but it seems to be pretty deeply entrenched in the area of “bad habits”.

I believe that the key to minimizing my own time loss is not to make some fuzzy, general resolution to “try harder”, but rather to look at each specific example and create alternative choices for my behaviors. So that’s a personal project for me whose “time” has come!