January - Almost a Memory

Ok, who reset my calendar AND my watch!

I always thought time would slow down as I grew older. It hasn't. I finally figured out why.

*Warning Science Content* (OK. Not so much)

As we grow older, our bodies slow down and don't function quite as well. Therefore, time appears to go much quicker. In reality time is still constant, we are what has changed speed.

I came to this realization after falling ill this week and taking a day off work Thursday. I felt better Friday and was busy so I didn't really notice the steps of time. Today, however, was a bit different.

I felt pretty good considering my state of health two days ago. I went got up this morning and headed off to what I had planned to be a productive day. I got my hair cut, went to the bank, got my medications filled and some other stuff I needed to pick up. The day was going well. Since I felt really great compared to Thursday, I decided I would hop to a couple other stores and the mall, just to get in some walking/exercise. It was in the mid 50's outside, so off I went. I didn't return home until after 2 or 2:30 pm.

This is where what I call, The Realization of Time, comes into play.

My lovely bad disks in my back had started to gripe, hence the reason I came home when I did. I brought all my purchases in and sat down to rest for just a few. I checked my work email because I was hoping to get approval for a rental car for my trip. I then decided to assemble the DVD rack I bought to keep the DVD's from tumbling from their temporary position on the DVD player. That done, I decided I would kick back and finish watching whatever the movie was that was on. I woke up after 6 pm wondering why the movie had suddenly gone from something that sounded like a normal movie to some wierd music that I hadn't heard, nor did I want to hear for that matter. Poof! There went my day.

So as you can see, time maybe is more linear and less relative than we thought. Maybe time isn't speeding up. We're Just SLOWWWWWWINN N N G D O W N.

A Certain Point Of View

My how things change as we age!

I look back over my life and think about things in the past. Good things, bad things they all seem to be slightly skewed or off color, like an old picture long forgotten in the box under the bed.

Are they skewed and off color, or has my view of lives important moments changed? I have found as I grow older that things have changed importance in my life. Things that once angered me now fill me with sorrow or dismay. The acts of others have become more tolerable, or at least they generate less of a reaction.

Have I mellowed with age? I don't think so. Things still affect me but my reactions are different from when I was younger. I've learned that anger returned only begets more anger in most cases. I've learned to 'bite my tongue' at times when in the past I would have said something out of anger or spite.

I have also learned that many times 'listening' and 'hearing' are not the same thing but both must be done simultaneously. Many times a person lashing out in anger or hurting from loss doesn't want or need excuses or 'I understand how you feel'. They want someone to hear what they are saying and understand where they are coming from. When we say 'I understand how you feel' without listening and hearing what the person is saying we often demean or devalue that person's problem. To them, we don't really seem to care. We're blowing smoke. Sometimes in order to help someone, we must 'manage' a situation. Learn to listen, hear and develop solutions that are beneficial rather than just popping off meaningless words.

I've noticed that in learning as I grow older, the meanings of things I thought were correct as a kid have changed. I look back and wonder if I was that stupid then or I'm that smart now, usually if I'm honest with myself neither is true. I was what I was in that instance of time. Now, I'm different. The sum of all those experiences has made me who I am, kind of like building a puzzle out of different pieces. Alone, they look out of place on the table when you first dump them out. Together, they become a large image. Just like a photo puzzle, our lives blend and merge as we grow, altering the view we have of ourselves and our perception of others, even blurring the edges of things that were once crisp clear-cut events in our lives.

Amazing how we change as we grow, isn't it? Things we hated, we love. Things we love, we now dislike. Things that made us sad now allow us to provide solace to others. Things we once did not care about have come to the forefront in our lives. People we used to not tolerate become tolerable. This is part of growing older. Knowing when and how to combine these moments in our lives to better ourselves brings us wisdom, for wisdom is having knowledge and being able to apply that knowledge for the betterment of ones self and ones surroundings.

The trick is not in the knowing how to use this wisdom for yourself, but how to reach out and share it with others allowing them to blossom from the sprinkling of your life into theirs. Reach out and force the knowledge onto someone and the wisdom becomes a sword that cuts them, injuring their spirit, turning their experience into an ugly scar on what could be a nurtured healthy life. Sometimes the best results of our wisdom come not from our own jagged edged experiences slashing out but from the combination of those experiences into gentle strength and piece of mind.

Which would you rather have? Helpful wisdom of the ages holding you up and supporting you like a loving parent to a child who scrapped their knee? or the razor's edge cutting into an already wounded sole, further scarring an already tattered life?

I know which I would prefer.

A World of Irony

It really is!

I spent the week in the DC Metro area working on a large scale project. It is a major deal. We have been working on it for sometime. Let's just say when the project roll out is over we'll have touched over 4000 employees (give or take a few).

Anyway, on with the irony. Our office is located underground, so any chance to work in the field offices is a chance to see daylight. This is ALWAYS a good thing. Any chance to get away from the office is also a good thing. Here's where the irony starts to come in.

Let's take a look at the facts:

• I work underground.
• We have no windows because the walls are rock and there is 200+ feet of rock over our heads.
• In the early stages, we made up a schedule for this project and for whatever reason the powers that be shortened by half or more.
• To save money, the company had us book all our travel through 'brand x' travel site. It took me 5 hours to find flights and hotels and get everything booked. I even had to call to have a live agent help find flights that fit company policy.
• We had wanted to wait until the end to do the DC area in case there was some kind of issue with setting the project up. It has the most highly concentrated group of employees that will be affected. This way we would do a few people, then a few more until we worked our way up to the DC area. This allows us to make changes to our procedures and things like that, 'Fine tuning' one might say.

Let's take a look at the irony:

• You need to remember that most hotels start their room numbers on the first floor (ie: Room 123). We get to our hotel, they have all our rooms together, 033, 035, 039, 041 and so on. Yes, I said 035. The hotel is built on a hillside and we are staying below the lobby in the part of the hotel cut back into the hillside, hence we are BELOW ground!
• We go to the location to set up. The primary location we end up working in is a conference room with NO Windows. The secondary location is down in a dip and has windows, but its so foggy in the morning that you can't even see the parking lot until after lunch.
• The squashed schedule didn't work. We are reworking the schedule to be very similar to the original 12 week schedule we produced at the beginning of the project.
• When the schedule started to change, it only took 2 phone calls on 3 minutes to cancel 5 hours worth of travel planning.
• Well, they had us start in the DC area. We found out that the average home DSL or cable connection has more bandwidth than either of the DC offices, thus we slowed the network to a snail's pace. As noted above, anything that gets changed in the process, now only adds time to it. We are now running extremely slow. The irony here is that, if we had done our original schedule and ramped up to this level, we would have known that the network resources had a large affect and would have changed the way the District Managers brought in employee' s equipment to be converted. We changed our process on the fly and got done what was on-site but have to go back now to get the rest.

So you see life does have ironies all around it. Some ironic situations we create for ourselves, some our created by others and/or our surroundings. All in all it made for an 'interesting' week.

Weary eyed and tired, I am home for the weekend.