Measurement of time , units of life

The new year buzz just zoomed past the last corner. Two days are up already. What has changed? 2008 + 0001 = 2009 . so in all the four-lined notebooks of school children , the excitement of writing a 09 in the date on the top left hand margin , instead of 08 , is about as far as it goes for the kids. Well, when in school all I remember was that I felt like something significant had happened somewhere somehow , but never could reckon what exactly , except for the change of the dates and exams coming nearer.

I wonder how orphaned or unaccounted for , we all would feel if this unit of measuring our life with time was absent altogether, which trickles down to the very absence of the basic ticking of seconds, milleseconds,nanoseconds….

May be we would all feel so lumpy and massive in our existence like a huge porridge sploch, formless and misshapen as opposed to this lean, sorted out , categorized and sequential noodle living that we have today.

To add a year to your life may mean a lot more to the middle aged adult population of the world.(its too trivial to notice when we are in school or college, when our homeworks , tests and our classroom crush seem like the ultimate driving force of life!)

So imagine the several thousand billions of the aging adult population all over the globe adding up an extra unit of worry , expectations , schedules and responsibilities along with the new year.  What you get is an additional indissoluble , emotionally loaded layer right above the skin of the last year, and the one before that. Quite a suffocating global scenario isn’t it? Like global warming was not enough, I’m guessing we wouldn’t want a global aging phenomenon…

Years seem to be good measuring tapes. These timelines that help us look at our life graphically and make us aware of the full impact of our living till date..we may end up with loads of junk , each with its own sentimental attachments, but junk it all is.

I saw ghajini this week, and its original, memento(a 2001 Hollywood flick) last week. Psychologically thrilling as they were, the very nature of the amnesia, the 15 minute short term memory loss leaves me quite stunned. It is such a modular existence, where 15 minutes are relived from the same start point of nought and with the same ending of nought but what fills them up is what he has lived. The irony being that it will be measured only by people around him. While he still conceives his living at point zero. The very thought leads to quite chilling and unnerving tangents.   

 

So we continue to measure more of time with our tapes and keep changing dates on our diaries. Waiting for one moment when time will freeze and all we know that we live solely by the sound of our heartbeats.

 

2009.. come on in..