3rd July 2001
Daily Dali Dalliance

Well here's today's offering... written not by me, but by someone I'm honoured to call "Significant Other". I'd been toying with the idea of writing exactly the same article, but it looks like she pipped me to it, and since it pretty much says everything I would have said, in pretty much the same ways I would have put it... (hence, of course, making it perfect... heh heh) here it is :)

----------------------------------------------Dali’s distortion of time….

365 days to a year. 24 hours to a day. 60 minutes to an hour. 60 seconds to a minute… and so on and so forth. Time has been flowing like a river.. wildly, freely, tumultuously, still, peaceful…. Deep.

I can never explain why some days seem to last forever whilst others are gone in a blink of an eye. Maybe time flies when you’re having fun as the saying goes, or maybe not. The agonising moments or the near-death experiences seem to last longer than a second. Your life flashes before your eyes, some have said, it’s a dance in slow motion others retort. Whatever it may be, time seems to be ruled by something. Not by emotions as I previously thought : different emotions seem to evoke changes in time variably. Perception and reality.

A very wise woman once said that perception is greater than reality. The truth is all that mattered to me once (I might go into that some other time). But, there is much truth, gold is never real, and never will be to a fool. Fool’s gold however, will be bought by the naïve or unknowledgeable. And from here we get the distortion of time.

Time is reality.. the reality is - no second is longer than it is. Changing the clocks is a man-pronounced system that works. Perception however is what you feel. When you are running a marathon, when you are drinking a cool pint on a hot summers day. When you kiss the person you love hello or goodbye. A good chat and a boring meeting. What makes the difference? No amount of wanting can seem to extend or shorten the time felt. The perception is granted to us whether we like it or not.

And yet, it is time that seems to rule the way we live. I have no time.. I am bored.. how can time rule us? It doesn’t. We all have the reality of 24 hours a day and we all have our different amounts of responsibilities, but in truth, our perception of time rules the reality of it.

I was trying to explain why a recent call seemed something very distant in the past and then again I tried to explain why another call couldn’t last longer as i watched the sun rise the next day. My perception was different with each emotion, each time, each person and thought I spent lulling it away. The reality was lost, lost to perception.

With this I guess, even the realest realist is not real because, if they were real, they’d understand now why perception is greater than reality.