Class Take-Away 8

Let's talk about time.
There's a quote that has gone around the inter-webs that says: "Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can't. You know the year, the month, and the day of the week. There's a clock on your phone, your wall, and in your computer. You have a schedule, a calendar, and a time for dinner. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. The birds outside are never late. A dog does not care for time nor a cat check his watch. Man alone measures time. And because of this, Man alone suffers a fear no other creature endures. A fear of time running out."
That has always stuck with me. Time is something humans came up with and yet it governs our entire lives. We have schedules and time zones and clocks everywhere so that we know the value of something that isn't real. It's like imaginary numbers. One by itself doesn't exist, but if you multiply two together, suddenly they do. One person could believe in time, but until someone else does too, it has only an imaginary value. Creepy, huh?
Now the class seemed to have a mutual complaint about our previous assignment: that it was too short of a timeline to do something really creative in. But as we demonstrated, that wasn't necessarily the case. There were a lot of neat ideas that floated around and they were upped only by the fact that we came up with them on such a short timeline. So what's this say about time and creativity? I'll get back to that but first I'd like to add that it was a noticeable trend in high school that during the time of the annual musical, many performers' grades would actually go up. This seems strange considering that we were putting in a lot of time and effort into the production, leaving homework to take a backseat. But what it really did was force us to buckle down and get our assignments done since our timetable was much shorter. We didn't dilly dally or putz around online or watch four more episodes of the Simpsons on Netflix.
So where is this going?
Perhaps one of the reasons we all did so well creatively was because we did have a shorter timeline. We were forced to come up with something quickly so our minds were constantly spinning the project around in our grey matter(s?). The point is this: because we had very little time the idea stayed fresh and we profited from that creatively. Quality may have been in issue, though. There were some grumbles about not being able to MAKE what was thought up and that's understandable. But the assignment, I felt, more or less dealt with the idea verses the thing.
So how will this help in my creative future?
Well I now have evidence to suggest that a shorter timeline to conceptualize can produce some highly creative thoughts. This may suggest that I should try thinking about what I want to do less and actually doing it more. It would be a fun experiment to try.
Time may not actually be real, but the rest of the world seems to think so, and therefore, I have to go. Breakfast awaits.