“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
There is a current meme floating around with this Einstein quote. Investigating the veracity of the meme quote, one site concluded it was from a busy Einstein through his secretary to a bothersome reporter needing a quote.
What started my thinking of relativity was seeing this meme a few days ago and it being Sunday. During the semi-quarantine period of our current pandemic, Señora and I started saying that we had two highlights to our week. On Wednesday we took the trash and recycling to the curb, and on Sundays we laundered the sheets. That saying has carried over to now. We really do have a bit of a more exciting life than that, but it does seem sometimes that life is eaten up with recurring, routine tasks.
Most Sunday mornings Señora and I have a scripted call and response we go through:
“It’s Sunday, time to strip the bed and wash the sheets.”
“Didn’t we just do that?””
“It was a week ago.”
“Really, it seems like just yesterday.”
“Again with the sheets…,” I can hear you saying.
We are all familiar with time-worn comparison of how long a year seems to a six year old child, and how short it seems to a 70 year old. Common wisdom declares this to be because a year is a 6th of the child’s life as compared to a 70th of the life of the senior citizen.
Thinking of this phenomenon, thanks to it being Sunday, sheet day and Internet memes, I began to wonder if it should not be reversed. In a universe ran by a fair and just prime mover, it should be fixed so that as we charge pell mell towards the finish line of our existence our sense of relative time would slow down rather than the sense of acceleration many of us feel.
Just saying.
And so it goes.
It’s the little things……