Which activities make you lose track of time?
Since I retired, I have feared losing my grasp on the need to keep learning and exposing myself to new things or revisiting old things in a new way. That isn’t because I want to widen the opinions I am ready to hold but to understand why what I believe still needs to be believed. Occasionally I find I jettison old myths.
To do this I need to read. While other media tend to dissipate my energy, make me listless and unfocused, especially TV, when I am engaged with reading my brain is making connections. I almost hear the synapses crackle, though in a soothing rhythmic way until some idea causes an explosion – perhaps the building of a new association of ideas.
When I read, I often afterwards clearly reread and take notes. This becomes material for blogs which I do to consolidate and deepen the associations in the thoughts, feelings and sensations. Then I put. Them on Word Press. If truly engaged time becomes lost. I know that for when I come out of it, I realise the first time that I have exhausted myself. I feel sapped in fact of emotion, ideas and motivation. This is quite frightening and I think of the time I have spent as lost because its passing was unconscious to me.
After a sleep and perhaps a day or two that silly notion of lost time goes. The kind of thing that Tennyson in ‘The Lotos Eaters’ calls the feeling that ‘all things are taken from us / and become portions and parcels of the Dreadful Past’, or words like that since I quote from memory only. Time that allows you to wander around its inner architecture is like the thing imagined in Piranesi’s Carceri drawings or the pleasure dome of Kublai Khan in Coleridge. It is time out, but at its best, allows a return that makes the time ongoing from it seem more charged with value.
So that’s it. Reading and writing provided it comes with that engaged feeling. All love. Steve.
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