Time... it will not wait.

[Robg]

So much has happened in 3 years, yet it feels I haven't gone anywhere or done anything of great significance. Okay, yes I have begun the coming out process, and yes I have been promoted and have a somewhat well paying job now, but in the grand scheme, my life really has not advanced towards a sense of joy.

Maybe dream up a goal/plan of something you wish to acheive/do. 'I want to travel Australia for 6 months and meet a different culture' for example. That is obviously hard to jugle with work but it's acheivable and would not be wasted time. There must be other, smaller goals that are easier to reach.
I think that even if i were to go to Australia or wherever that i would not have the power to enjoy it so there deinately needs to be a happiness eminating from inside to really make the best of time. I am i sufferer of depression.

[Sil]

Fascinating device! I'm glad people are still crafting and making incredible and interesting things like this...

I have been thinking a lot about this issue as in a little over 9 months time I will be hitting the big 30... Most of my adult life I always associated that age with being 'not young', almost as if my body has matured but my brain is still catching up!

I really regret a lot of missed opportunities from my very early 20's, but I also had a reciprocal chat with a good friend where we agreed we found this to be one of the more stressful periods of growing up, a secondary puberty. You realise your adulthood, and obligations, and are forced to make a lot of difficult choices to remain part of the flow of things within society. No longer are you allowed to f*ck about and live life from day to day, and the increasing weight of responsibility is hard. It becomes better and by that I mean you become pleased with what you've achieved, but it's a very different happiness bordering on content in the late 20's. Not a revelry.

That's what I miss most really - the closeness and spontanaeity... teen years and very early 20s allow you to just immerse yourself in social groups of likeminded people, and it's part of the reason you have the best times then. Increasingly I find myself to have a few 'hardcore' friends and then work buddies and acquaintances. It's very much toned down.

It depends what speed you like to fly at... I made my own choices and didn't like being rushed, and I ended up at this point through my own will. I am scared of ageing, I may become one of these people who lies about their age when I'm having a midlife crisis

[marshlander]

I had forgotten all about this thread, but I was walking round Cambridge a few weeks ago and stumbled across it quite by accident. It is an amazing piece of work!! See it if you can.

[charley]

Apart from what is spontaneous, or play, or intimacy, that is, unstructured time, life is mostly about putting in time in a structured way. I like unstructured time a lot. It is such a luxury. I think it's easy to expect too much of life. There's a poem by Hardy called "On My 86th Birthday" in which he says that because he mostly expected "neutral tinted haps and such" that he could "bear the strain and ache that each year might assign." There is a sane comfort in Kenneth Graheme's Wind in the Willows, too... I guess that the trouble with time as taken by the Efficiency First people is that they always turn it into a race! As for ageing, well, yes, the body gets its own back... in fact I'm nursing a sore back and am missing work cos of a fall in a snowstorm that wouldn't have bothered me when younger! But really I felt like I was "oh my God I'm getting older" most strongly around 21-23. Now I hardly think about it. Not very philosophic today lol.