It's About Time

Here we are then at the beginning of a whole new year. Hopefully it's started out good for you and will continue to improve as the year progresses. However you celebrated, I hope it was how you wanted it to be.

But let's think for a moment. Is January the first really any different from any other day? It's a good excuse for a party, certainly, and those fireworks manufacturers need to make their cash sometime but it's really just another tick of the clock, isn't it? Why chose that particular combination on the clock's YMCA hand-jive to cheer? In fact, why do we set our watches and calendars the way that we do anyhow?

The idea of turning our planet's orbit around the sun into a standard unit of time seems sensible to me. It's pretty constant and predictable at around 365 and a quarter days so we're quite comfortable with the concept of a 'Year'. And our earth's rotation around its own axis is stable too. Again, a 'Day' is a great way of measuring time, to track the number of sunrises regardless of how long or short the gap between them might be, depending on the season.

But  for shorter units than that? How come we have the seemingly arbitrary idea of twenty-four hours in a day?* And the apparently equally random sixty minutes in an hour?** Whoever came up with those must have had their (however bizarre) reasons but credit to them for making the entire world go ahead with their way of thinking. Personally I'd have had us all counting our time in units of tens. That seems to work for most people (although perhaps not Anne Boleyn). We live with what we've got though and, the French being a notable exception, most people for the last few centuries have got on with it quite well.

In the end though it's not about measuring your time in minutes, hours and days but in smiles and hugs. Every shadow passing over the sundial is an opportunity for fun, love and productivity, not just another tick to be tocked off. You'll never look back on your life and say "I wish I'd looked at my watch more often".

We'll only pass through 2014 once. Live it well.

Notes for those vaguely interested

* Why we have 24 hours in a day - The ancient Egyptians divided their working day (i.e. sunlight hours) into tenths and then added an extra 'hour' of twilight at each end, giving a twelve hour day. If a day was twelve hours long then it stood to reason (to them) that a night was twelve hours long too, which is why they had twenty-four hours in their day, a tradition that we've carried on.

** Why we have sixty minutes in an hour - The Babylonians, who were a bit better than me at maths, liked to do their workings out in a base-60 system. Good for them. I got a bit lost reading a heavy book on why that was the case but even I can see that there's a clue there to the number of minutes in an hour and seconds in a minute.

© Shaun Finnie 2014