Remaining intellectually youthful...

So the book is Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney K. Makridakis. 

My daughter, Julie, and I are challenging each other to read this book together and then do "some" of the artistic suggestions or some spin off of them in order to explore time.  

The first chapter is a background exploration of how time is perceived.  

I underlined a few quotes from the first chapter: 

"In fact, the true 'present' is so brief that it can't even be perceived". and 

"Leonardo da Vinci said, 'the water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming.  Thus it is with time present."

Then she talks about the different ways we define time in linear continuums...

• The scientific: order to disorder
• The linear: past, present, future
• The narrative: beginning, middle, end
• The perception: slow to fast
• The aging: young to old

And then as a nice contrast to that, how we think of time qualitatively in non linear time...

• bad time to good time
• comic time to serious
• orderly to chaotic
• conscious to subconscious
• quiet to loud
• static to kinetic
• bland to stimulating

So the questions that we are asked to answer in our first assignment are ones like...

1. If you had more time how might your life be different?
2. Do you wear a watch?  Why or why not?
3. What was "time" like in your home growing up? What beliefs did your parents have about time?
4. What drew you to this book?

(There are actually 13 in this first set.). Then we put them in our "time box".  But I've chosen to put mine in a "time envelope".  Who needs another box???

So as a note at the end here...I opened the Nov/Dec issue of Saturday Evening Post today and the article I read first is "The Quiet Diet" by Cable Neuhaus about the value of Quiet Time.  I quote: "Mice, when exposed to two hours of silence every day, developed new cells in the region of the brain that controls memory, emotion and learning." It discusses the troubling results of "noise pollution" and suggests by "carving out a quiet interlude every day, meditators remain intellectually youthful longer." 

So Zentangle® and art in general can promote wellness...I knew it all along.  Tune in for more on my quest for creating quality time.  And I'll keep this article in my "time envelope".