Isn't time intriguing?

Today I felt like I have experienced what Claudia Hammond calls the Holiday Paradox in her book I read some time ago, Time Warped.

The paradox is a “contradictory feeling that a good holiday whizzes by, yet feels long ago when you look back.” She terms it as a clash between the “experiencing self” and “remembering self.”

I may not have been on a holiday over the weekend, but the good break I had from a long stressful week felt like one. When Monday arrived this morning, Friday felt so very long ago.

Hammond explains that it “is caused by the fact that we view time in our minds in two very different ways — prospectively and retrospectively. Usually these two perspectives match up, but it is in all the circumstances where we remark on the strangeness of time that they don’t…We constantly use both prospective and retrospective estimation to gauge time’s passing. Usually they are in equilibrium, but notable experiences disturb that equilibrium, sometimes dramatically. This is also the reason we never get used to it, and never will. We will continue to perceive time in two ways and continue to be struck by its strangeness every time we go on holiday.”

Time is really something, isn’t it?

pearlie