The Perception of Time …

When I was younger, I remember older people be it my parents, grandparents or others saying something along the lines of ~ “my life went by so fast, it seems like yesterday I was 19, 25, and now I have no idea where all that time went. I just blinked and suddenly I am 65, 70 or 80.” …. My response to hearing such things was always to think ~ “what a strange way to be alive …”

Now that I have reached an age where I am beginning to fill the void left by all those older people, I find that I am now experiencing life going by too fast, and saying the very same things that were once said to me. 

Why does this happen …?

I believe in part it is down to “routine”, the enemy of time, which makes the days fly by. When you’re a kid everything is astonishing, everything is new, your brain is awake, alert and turned on, so in every passing second you are learning something new, and how the world around you works.

As you get older, your brain has worked out the patterns of how the world works, how to go to school, how to get a job, how to manage money, how to get a mortgage and so much more of life’s standard requirements. Once you have all that unlocked, and there are infrequent novel experiences, your brain establishes a routine, it stops, and the alertness goes away, along with the fascination of how the world around you works.

So perhaps a solution to this ~ is to keep your brain fascinated and turned on, plan to be aware of every single day you’re alive, with the desire to reach your last day thoroughly exhausted because your time was not wasted.

I think this is the duty of being an adult, because when you’re a kid and everything is new you don’t have to work for it, your surroundings come to you. But once you’re an adult it becomes a choice, you can choose adventure for your own life, to go and find things that are interesting, that will turn your crank and keep the brain active during the search ~ it’s about getting out of your routine, which can look like anything.

With this in mind, in recent years I have raised the pace of my life ~ with photography, lots of time spent smiling at nature, volunteering for the CWGC, getting involved with numerous WWI & WWII research projects, writing, building a boat, ticking off my travel bucket list and much more.

The travelling has been a particular highlight that has rewarded me with visits to new and beautiful places, offering extraordinary sights and memorable experiences, all while keeping me fascinated, alert and ready for the unexpected, of which there has been a few ..!!

Life here in the South Shore together with my many wanders does it too, regardless of how many times I walk the same beach or hike that same trail, each outing keeps the brain turned on by offering something new, different and occasionally exciting.

In conclusion, I don’t want the days to control me or the calendar to be my boss, I want to control my days, I want to choose the adventures, which will create a mind and soul that is wide awake, which may turn my 80, 90, 100 or preferably 113 years on this planet into feeling something like a 1000 ~ I hope ~ but if not, it will certainly be good, deeply rewarding and fun while I try …

Having said all that, my day today was in fact controlled, by an external force ~ too much snow. Before the obligatory clear up, I went out with my camera and took some pics around the empire, into the forest, then down to the LaHave River, before the tractor and snow blower got to work …

Pale Blue Dot ...

Here we are in the year 2026 and planet earth appears to be getting crazier, with its continued and somewhat determined course of threats, unrest, violence, destruction and death …

From billions of kilometres away our planet does not shine or standout, it almost disappears. I recently read that in August 2012, the spacecraft Voyager One (as a 16 year old I recall watching its launch in September, 1977) was leaving our solar system forever. To mark the event scientists made a request to turn the spacecraft around to take one last photograph of our home. At that moment Voyager was nearly 6 billion kilometres away, further than any human object had ever travelled before. 

From the image earth was barely visible, captured as a tiny spec floating in a narrow beam of sunlight, surrounded by endless darkness. That single dot contained everything that humanity has ever known, every city, every ocean, every war and every human life that ever existed. From that unimaginable distance, borders vanish, nations lose meaning and human conflicts feel fragile and small.

The resulting photograph became known as the “Pale Blue Dot”, and it delivered one of the most powerful messages in history ~ in a universe so vast and silent, earth is not the centre of anything. 

World leaders from the past and unfortunately still in the present, who have an excessive focus on themselves, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, self-praise, and the tendency to view oneself as superior or more central than others, have created the vast amounts of unrest, violence, destruction and death. In relative terms, our existence as humans together with the lifespan of our planet is incredibly brief ~ so while we are here, why all the violent and needless mayhem …?

This pics below are from this afternoon's incredible and rather warm beach wander on our Pale Blue Dot ….

Never forgotten in Leopoldsburg, Belgium …

In recent years on Christmas Eve, some of the town’s people of Leopoldsburg in Belgium have held a ceremony at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery.

There are 767 Commonwealth burials from WWII in the cemetery, 16 of them unidentified, and also a number of Polish and Dutch war graves. One of the graves belongs to my relative Hugh Wright, a Royal Engineer attached to the 49^th Infantry Division (The Polar Bears). Hugh was killed in Wuustwezel, Belgium on 21 October 1944.

The photos below were sent to me tonight from Belgium ~ thank you Cindy from Leopoldsburg, who regularly visits and cares for Hugh’s grave. 

You can learn more about Hugh and his war service from the following blogs, click on the images or links …

https://southshoretidewatch.blogspot.com/2017/10/hugh-wright.html

 

https://southshoretidewatch.blogspot.com/2024/06/euro-2024-wuustwezel.html

https://southshoretidewatch.blogspot.com/2024/06/euro-2024-my-return-to-leopoldsburg-war.html