Time marches

There are at least two things which almost everyone thinks they have got, which in fact almost no one has. One is the ability to tell if someone is lying. The other is an accurate awareness of time passing.

After spending a lot of time with lying people and also with people who are suppsoed to figure out who is lying, I think I have a handle on this one. What people often do have is a sense of integrity, of seamlessness. I think most people can add up the nonverbal cues and add them to what is actually being said and make a fairly good determination of whether those things add up. I think most of us do this without even thinking about it.

Which of course gets one exactly no where with say, a sociopath. Or a person who really believes what they are saying even when it *coff* lacks that one-to-one mapping onto reality which we call the truth.

People who can also rapidly consider whose ox is being gored while watching someone talk are even more accurate. However, such people are few and far between; most of us are too occupied thinking about what we are going to say next or what we might have just said (damn, what was I thinking) or even the adult equivalent of What Am I Going to Do For My Science Fair Project to really give our attention to what is actually being said.

One of the things that always interests me is that most of us focus on visual cues when people are talking. Being an auditory person, I have found it most useful to instead pay attention to the sound of people's voices, their pace and pitch and breathing. Because no one ever actually bothers to disguise those things, so they? Ours is a very visual approach.

However, the time thing I am still chewing on.

I personally have almost no sense of time's passage. I have only one time related quirk: if I decide to wake up at a particular time, I always do. It doesn't matter what time it is; I just have to decide, and then go to sleep. Though I found out once that I also have to know what time it is when I go to sleep or it doesn't work. All events are shelved in my mid as: today, yesterday, the other day. Though if pressed I can usually remember what season it was.

Dearly Beloved has an eerily accurate sense of time. You can stop him at random and ask him how much time has passed since >event x< and he will tell you almost immediately. He is always right, even though he is not aware of keeping track. It's as though he has an internal atomic clock in there, just ticking away.

It seems to me that a lot of special effort is devoted to taming time, domesticating it. Most people have no real idea of how they spend their time, and if asked to say, they are almost always wrong. We hold one another accountable under a publicly evolved system. We are all connected all right, connected in an intricate, invisible webbing of clockwork relations that employ units of time.