The Passing of Time

As I sat on campus today, slowly waiting until I lost all concept of time, I began finding other ways to keep track of passing minutes. The interesting thing about this process was that most of my ideas actually seemed like good ideas. I expected to just make up dumb ways of tracking my time, but to my astonishment, most of them actually worked consistently!

The first method I tracked, was by watching water drip off a rain gutter from the building I was sitting beneath. The drips came consistently. I imagined putting a small cup to catch the drips. By measuring how many cups the water filled up in a day, I could easily track the passage of time.

The second method I found, was slightly weird. I randomly had a bunch of those cool eraser hats in my backpack. You know those ones we loved as kids that you can put on the back of your pencil? They are different colors and sometimes different shapes? I was bored, so I started rubbing one on the ground. Then I started rubbing it around in a circle. I found it slowly wore down, meaning that I could track time with eraser wear. In my estimation, one day is about 1.5 erasers worn.

The last method I discovered, I'll admit, wasn't actually all that clever. I noticed that it took everyone walking past me, about 19 Mississippis to make it from a specific tree, to the Indian statue that i'm sure you are all aware of. How hard could it be to just hire a full-time walker so that we can all tell what time it is?

I expected it to be pretty easy to find ways to track the time, but now I understand why people back in the day didn't have clocks or accurate time measurements. It's pretty hard to find something consistent that doesn't run off of a gear! Kudos to those geniuses.