One more week to go...

...of Blog Every Day April.

While I've never written it here, I've admitted to several people face-to-face that this blogging thing is a lot more difficult than I first thought. How hard could it be to come up with something to write every day? I thought, and it was that attitude that I had when I went into this thing. Now, I'm looking at the light at the end of the tunnel that is the month of May and anticipating that month greatly as it creeps closer towards me.

Just because of this blogging thing, April has felt like the longest month in a long time.

Before all this, when my routine was pretty much dictated for me - wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, eat lunch, do more work, come back home, eat dinner, sleep - the days passed by faster than ever and it was days like that which felt as if they were being wasted. Now, with the days seeming to pass much slower, it doesn't feel like I'm wasting so much time.

So what has BEDA injected into my routine that has caused this perception of the slowing of time? I can't really pinpoint what it is, but I'm going to make some guesses.

Firstly, it's caused me to lose a lot of sleep.

Often I find myself typing into the wee hours of the night as I attempt to get the next post for the day out before the clock strikes midnight. I upload it to my website, and then go make sure the blogging application I use on Facebook has picked it up and then I manually post it so that it shows up as part of my activity for my friends to read it. Then I duplicate it over to my blog on the Maureen Johnson Ning network so other members of BEDA (most notably my BEDA buddies) can read and comment on it. By the time this is all done, it's probably just after midnight, meaning I cut my sleep short by maybe an hour. Multiply this by the number of days in April thus far (excluding the rare occasion when I write it ahead of time because of other commitments in the day) and that's a lot of hours of sleep lost.

So there's the possibility the days seem longer because I'm sleeping less.

Secondly, I'm taking the time to observe the world around me a lot more than usual.

Taking the time to notice more so that I might use it as material for this blog has got me thinking more about those things. I dissect and disseminate everything that might at first seem blog-worthy and maybe try to write a few sentences on the subject in my head to see how the idea will play out. This gets me wondering and using my internal dialogue a lot more, and I think it's this kind of active thinking that has time slow down some. Idle wandering thoughts tend to take me out of the moment such that when I return, it's several minutes later and I've forgotten what I was doing.

So there's also the possibility that active thinking is stretching the time I have available to me.

Lastly, BEDA has a clearly defined end goal.

When working towards a goal, I tend to feel that a lot more time is spent in the present, the now. Say you've got a job that isn't doing it for you today and all that you want is for your shift to end or for the clock to hit 5pm. The moment seems to drag and that ending is always too far away for your liking. I'm not saying that Blog Every Day April is like a crappy job, but looking forward to something always makes it seem farther away. A more light-hearted example might be of children waiting for Christmas morning to come so that they can see what Santa has left for them under the tree.

So maybe it's just one of those things, or maybe it's a combination of all of the above. All I know is that BEDA has been good for me: my friends (and maybe random passers-by) have gotten to know a bit more about me, I've gained BEDA buddies and got to feel like I was part of a larger community in the process, and I feel as if this month has not been wasted.

All this guesswork as to my changing perception of time has reminded me of this quote from Einstein - a man who at least knew what he was talking about:

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.
Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
THAT'S relativity.

Given that, BEDA is more akin to a hot stove than a pretty girl; a hot stove that has made me feel good about myself.