The speed at which time passes is flexible--rather, our perception of the speed at which time passes is flexible. Anyone who's ever been in a life-threatening crisis will testify to that. While the crisis is going on, time seems to stretch as though one is falling over the event horizon of a black hole. Once the crisis has passed, the putative victim is inevitably shocked to discover that what seemed like hours of agony really took but minutes, or even seconds, to pass.
I have been thinking a lot about the human brain's flexible response to the passage of time. I spent much of the first 60% of my life moving, not just from state to state, but overseas, once each to Southeast Asia and to Europe. The reality of being so frequently on the move not only helped me keep my own personal entropy under control; it helped me stay connected--plugged in, if you will--to the larger energy of world-wide events.
I have spent the subsequent 40% of my life to date living in one place. Yes, I've taken trips [though, mostly for logistical reasons connected to my lung disease, I've had to keep these trips to one day's length--Ed.], but somehow it's not the same. I still pay a great deal of attention to the events passing on the world's stage, and I still actively pursue learning so as better to evaluate the effects of those events on not just my life, but ultimately on history itself. But the sense of being "part of the flow" has vanished. And my own personal entropy has gotten totally out of hand.
Sometimes, I feel that even though I am still alive, my life is slipping away from me. I find that frightening. I'm not even distracted by the hum-drum of the minutiae of everyday living. I'm disconnecting from it. Some 40-year-old memories I have are more vivid in my brain than are memories I've generated in the past year. Maybe this should make me glad--I'm sure it reduces my levels of stress. But I cannot escape the vague sensation that somehow, it's very, very wrong, and I should fight it as hard and for as long as I can. I do not want to have to move, not ever again. But maybe it's exactly the physical jolt I need to overcome my mental entropy and the physical entropy surrounding me.
I am still quite good at working up some righteous anger over the injustices I see in the larger world, as anyone who's read more than one of these posts can attest. I have made it a habit of expressing my opinions and the reasons for them in more, and more diverse places. The beauty of a good idea is that once it's given expression, it's able to influence untold numbers in untold ways . . . not unlike the impact an excellent teacher can have on someone's life. Or such is my hope, that one of my little mental gems has sparkled and caught the attention of someone I don't even know, and that it has [in a way I cannot predict--Ed.] made a difference for the better in that person's life.
If this is mere dream or delusion, so be it. Leave me my dream, my delusion. It's all I have left.
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Another odd thing about humanity's flexible perception of time involves anticipation. Note that anticipation is not necessarily a good thing. One may anticipate happy events that are to come, such as weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, reunions, what have you. But one may also anticipate upcoming appointments with dread, as I surmise the football players of Louisiana-Lafayette must have felt as their game against the mighty University of Nebraska, played yesterday, approached. Many people who watch the History Channel are getting all het up about the upcoming end of the world that's been predicted for 12/21/2012. Getting to yesterday must have felt that same way to the Ragin' Cajuns as they came to Lincoln to accept their drubbing at the hands of the Cornhuskers. If it wasn't the apocolypse, it was a pertect storm, and the Ragin' Cajuns knew they were plunging into its heart.
The factors creating this perfect storm? (1) Homecoming for the Huskers. Every team is hyper-hyped to win its homecoming game. The Huskers are no exception. (2) The 300th consecutive stadium home game sell-out in NU history. This is the longest active streak in NCAA history; Notre Dame holds the second-longest streak, at a 1/3 shorter 207 games. The only proper way to celebrate such a milestone is with a win--a BIG win. (3) Nebraska was coming off a loss, by one point, to Virginia Tech--a loss the Huskers let happen after having had the game in hand for about 58 of its 60-minute duration. Anyone who knows anything about Nebraska knows that the opponent facing NU the week after such a painful, self-inflicted defeat is going to be chewed up and spat out. And then stomped on. And then stomped on some more.
The final score was 55-0. Yes, Nebraska won. I hope the Ragin' Cajuns' share of the take from ticket sales and pay-per-view was worth what it probably cost the Louisiana-Lafayette players' psyches. True, they could see it coming. The first two factors have been known since the game was put on the schedule. But the third factor happened only a week before, and that's what makes me wonder about how the Ragin' Cajuns perceived the passage of time in that week before their annihilation for the sake of NU's quest to get back national championship glory.
I'm guessing the week seemed to pass very slowly to the Ragin' Cajuns. No sane person looks forward to being on the receiving end of such an experience. I would think they'd want it to be over and done with as soon as possible . . . thus making the time before it happened slow to a crawl. Oddly enough, I suspect the Huskers felt the same way. Every day they had to live with the taste of the Virginia Tech loss only increased their desire to replace the bitterness with the sweetness of a huge win. Who cares that the opponent was the proverbial 97-pound weakling?
And that's what is so odd about how human anticipation affects human perception of the passing of time. It's the waiting that's the operative factor, not whether the predicted outcome is dreaded or hoped for. Not to mention that when the event finally happens, it seems to fly by quickly and be either much less painful or much less satisfying than anticipated. Doubtless there is some biochemical explanation for this, but I cannot help but hope that biochemistry isn't the end of it. My experiences tell me that when we die, we're done. We're gone. But my heart hopes my experiences aren't telling me everything.
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In our minds, we are free to jump about in time--that's why I so love history and science fiction--but our own personal time-lines are linear and one-way. And history gives us good data for making predictions about the future--if we "read the tea leaves" correctly, that is. But even though we can anticipate certain outcomes, there's always room for that once-in-a-million shocker, that upset of epic proportions which ameliorates the sense of dread and impending doom faced by, say, people about to go to the dentist, people about to go to a tax audit, and the Ragin' Cajuns last week. The shockers are rare, to be sure. That's why they are, literally, one in a million; but they CAN happen. And I suppose that that is why our sense of dread/impending doom does not overwhelm us. On paper, Team A is far better than Team B. Yet Team B can, and on rare occasions, does, win the game. That, to quote the sports cliché, is why you have to play the game.
This year's Chicago Cubs illustrate this most excellently. Last year, the Cubs won 97 games, and took the NL Central title handily. And got swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Dodgers, 0-3. So the front office made personnel changes, and the talking heads on ESPN and MLBTV thereupon agreed that the Cubs once again would be the class of the league. Not all the fans agreed, however. Many of us wish to this day that the Cubs had not acquired Milton Bradley and had kept Mark DeRosa, but why the fans so often seem to know better than management is a topic for another day.
You still have to play the game . . . and when you do play the game, things happen. Unexpected, unanticipated things. Bad things. Third baseman Aramis Ramirez missed something like 50 games with a dislocated shoulder. The Cubs were almost 10 games over .500 when Ramirez got hurt, and went straight into the tank when their leading RBI man was lost to them for almost 1/3 of the season. They were as low as 4th place in mid-summer, though they did manage to claw their way back into a brief tie for the division lead before sinking firmly back to second place by the end of the dog days of August.
Outfielder Milton Bradley, always a prickly personality, did not play anywhere near his potential, or even up to the level he'd played for Texas the year before. His acrimonious relationship with the fans shocked me. Chicago Cubs fans embrace the Cubs like almost no other fans in any sport. They follow the careers of former Cubs and continue to root for them and wish them well (except for maybe when they are actually playing against the Cubs, that is--but Cubs fans still applaud them when they are introduced and when they come to bat).
The one thing Cubs fans hate is the player who isn't giving his best efforts at all times, the player who acts like he doesn't care. To the fans, Bradley did not seem to care or to be giving his all, resulting in his being mildly chided by some. But then Bradley opened his mouth and complained about how awful the fans and the city were treating him . . . and it got so bad that he was suspended and sent home almost a full month before the end of the season. [That he's had similar problems everywhere he's played should lead him to realize something, to wit: it's him, not the fans. He doesn't seem to have that kind of self-awareness, however.--Ed.]
And Mark DeRosa, traded into the American League (to Cleveland) so he wouldn't compete directly against the Cubs, got traded again. To St. Louis. Where he wound up playing directly against the Cubs after all. He is now an important part of the Cardinals' unpredicted rise to the NL Central title, which they clinched last night.
As September proceeded, and the Cardinals' "magic number" to clinch the division title shrank, several strange things happened. The Cubs started playing the way we fans knew they could, and they got back to several games over .500 (as I write this). St. Louis started playing a bit erratically, and lost some games the Cardinals should have won. The Cardinals' "magic number" to clinch hovered at "1" for several days. What that "magic number" means is that any combination of 1 win by the Cardinals OR one loss by the Cubs would make it mathematically impossible, even if the Cubs won all the rest of their remaining games, for the Cubs to wrest the title from the Cardinals.
Seeing a "magic number" hover for days at "1" is something I do not remember ever experiencing before. In my heart of hearts, knowing it was totally silly, I yet began to let a little hope for the impossible take root. Could the Cubs do it? Could they really win all their remaining games? That half of the equation seemed eminently possible. But would the Cardinals in turn lose ALL their remaining games? Not bloody likely. They're too good. And even if the Cards did, there'd still have to be a one-game playoff for the division title.
But as the Cards proved last night in coming from behind to beat the Colorado Rockies 6-3 and thus clinch the NL Central crown, they were in fact too good to let the title slip away. No matter that the Cubs earlier yesterday had beaten the San Francisco Giants.
Still, it kept the NL Central division race interesting a lot later into September than I'd have predicted (had anyone asked) back in August. What does all this has to do with time passing? Once again it comes back to anticipation. The hoped for, no matter how unlikely, can make our perception of the speed of time's passing slow down. In this case, unlike the case of the Huskers football team, however, it was not because of a rush to get beyond a prior insult or injury, but because of how good it felt to have a germ of hope springing to life inside.
What's even odder is that now that that hope has died, its death doesn't seem to hurt as much as its lack of existence at all, back in August, pained me. I wonder how the Cubs players themselves feel about the events of September, 2009. I suspect that they'd given up on any realistic chance to win the NL Central back around Labor Day, which is about when they started playing better again. For even though this year's team is not responsible for the Cubs' lack of a World Series title for more than 100 years, that century must weigh on them. They know their fans have come to expect a winner, and they [except for Milton Bradley, that is--Ed.] want to be that winner. This desire doubtless is reinforced every time the litany of all the close calls and missed opportunities ever since 1984 is replayed.
What the Cubs need to do as a team is learn a little Zen. They must embrace the burden by letting it go. To focus and concentrate on the big goal while not thinking about it during each at bat and each defensive play. To play to their capabilities without forcing them, without feeling obligated to carry around those 100-plus years of expectations. They have to feel the pressure, but not feel it; they must channel it to enhance their moment-to-moment performance, not let it swamp and thus overwhelm their thinking. I know from my own participation in various organized sports that this is the hardest thing to do and yet it is the only thing that separates champions from also-rans.
And I am taking some comfort in the Cubs' performance these past few weeks. Almost to the second they knew realistic pressure was off, they began playing like the winners they can be. I just hope they can internalize that during the off-season, and come back in 2010 to play the way it says they should "on paper." Just don't let them read it!
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