Time

Okay, enough Monkey Kickball, you all beat me...

For some reason all day yesterday I was thinking about time and how we've made our lives so incredibly constrained by it. Let me explain.

Go all the way back to creation. God creates and there are only two units of time, evening and morning. Our day was divided into one of two, you were either in daylight, or you were in night. That's it.

Then, sometime, the standard for the day was split into 5. There was dawn (6:00), the mid-morning, or the 3rd hour (9:00), noon (12:00), mid-afternoon, or the 9th hour (3:00) and dusk (6:00). If you were to meet someone, you would use one of those first 4 times (you didn't usually meet after dark). Our day was now divided a little more...

Then at some point we divided our day into 24 hours. Some trace this back to the Babylonians using a 12 hour clock but I don't know how reliable that is. There is also evidence of Egyptians having a 12 hour clock in 1300 B.C. (10 hours day, 2 hours twilight, 12 hours night), but it wasn't in common practice like the 5 division Roman day. The Romans still recognized those hours (as evident by the 3rd hour, 6th hour, etc.) but were still 5 divisions in practice. Either way, for centuries this was used, mostly by astronomers and people related to the stars (navigators and scientists too). Why 24? Who knows. A common theory is because 24 is an easily divisible number (2,3,4,6,8,12).

But that wasn't enough.w had to break it down more. Back to those whacky Babylonians and their astronomers, at sometime between 300-100 B.C. they divided by 60 (again, easy to divide by) and created minutes and seconds. Now our lives are measured even more minutely.

But that's still not enough. If you watched the Olympics, you would have noticed that they needed to make time smaller, 100th's of a second. And for me, all the music stuff I do, well, that's even more minute. I go to 1000ths of a second.

We have made time so small, and in doing so, made it so big in importance. It just seems crazy to me that we would do that, we would micro mange ourselves into the 1000th's of a second.

And yet, through all this, it's still not right. A standard day, full revolution of the earth, well, that's only 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds...

T