Clocks: what if there were a clock that only measured time spent in a state of heightened awareness and pleasure, which we commonly call “living”, to distinguish it from our ordinary time? What if there were a clock which only measured time spent in misery, and what if we defined that as “potential learning” time? How would those clocks compare to one that counted our ordinary time?
Trains: I was watching a model train set at the Museum of Science and Industry the other day, and found it strangely soothing. The trains just go in the same loops over and over, day after day. I remember the trains in Switzerland, which would start moving the very second the second hand on the large clocks on the platforms hit the minute of departure.
Trains go in tracks. They do the same thing every day, at the same time. Is their quality of “living” different than that of horses, or shoes, which travel all sorts of places? Are the contents of the trains not different every day; or, in the case of the model trains, are not different eyes on them every day? Is the exact content of their work not different every day? Is the difference in the fact of work different between trains and shoes? Is the quality of life radically different between someone who lives “artistically”, moving erratically and unpredictably, and someone who is an insurance examiner, who works precisely between 8 and 5 across decades? Not intrinsically.
Sometimes I think we ask too much of life. Trees have their work; squirrels have theirs. The stars travel in their paths, which change only across millions of years. If we treat the fact of work as a given, and choose not to remain attached to one way of being relative to another, I think the sort of work, and the regularity or strangeness with which we choose to do it, matters far less than we supposed.
I am a bit hung over, certainly living “artistically” today, and will offer that as explanation for the oddity of this post, which is intended to express linearly some “cloudy” thoughts–sentiments, really.