7 Minutes

7 Minutes
Monday, July 30, 2001



7 minutes. It used to be ten. This used to be called 10 Minutes Tops but then Jennifer Hamill and Aldrich discovered that 10 minutes was really a little too much. You can endure anything for 7 minutes but that extra 3 minutes really can ruin your day.

We think of time as a completely objective thing. Like it's an absolute. But Einsteinian and Quantum models of the Universe and our own real experience agree on this. Time is a completely subjective phenomenon. In fact, although they have been trying for years, physicists have been unable to come up with a theoretically basis for times arrow. The equations work either backward or forward. In fact there are those who believe that there is really just one particle, or maybe two, that is moving backward and forward in time meeting itself a zillion times and embroidering the entire universe.

There is no reason why time goes forward except that that's how we experience it. And how we experience it changes profoundly as we have more experience with it. Time I mean.

For example: To a new born child, one day is 100% of its life. If we could remember that one day I think it would seem like it lasted for a year or more. Think about how long first grade seemed to last in your memory. When you are five years old, one year is 20% of your life. When you're 10 that same loop around the sun is only 10% of your life. A year of college will typically take up about 5% of your life up until that point. For me a year lasts about 2.8% of my life and its getting smaller all the time.

My friend's father showed him this demonstration after he completed high school and it terrified him. He showed it to me when I was about 19 and it terrified me then. It has turned out to be most accurate with an interesting exception.

It goes like this. Each finger is worth 15 years. Life goes like this….

Time flies when you stop paying attention.

Now 1988 was the second longest year of my life. 1988 was the first year for Annex Theater in Seattle. When I think about all the stuff that happened in that year it seems more like a decade. It was also the year I met the love of my life.

When I decided to start Sacred Fools I thought back on that year and how fantastic it was. And I realized it was because I had no idea what was going to happen or how it would work out. I was constantly jumping blindly off of cliffs and seeing where I would land. I decided that I wanted every year of my life to be like that one. So I started this crazy experiment.

So the longest year of my life was 1997 when we started sacred fools and found this place and moved in and did 5 shows and 20 one acts and 10 tops was invented and somehow I got married somewhere in there. It was great and spectacular. Because I kept jumping off cliffs and into the nameless abyss. Maybe it's a question of how many heartbeats you fit into a year.

See I think if you want to have a long life it doesn't matter how long it is in objective time. What's important is subjective time. How long does it feel? Like if you do the same damn thing every single day so they all blend together then you'll be 95 before you know it. And if you live to be 120 then who cares? Certainly not you.

So what I'm doing that's new and crazy this year is having a baby. Which brings me back to the whole objective subjective time thing. The thing you always have to remember when you're raising kids is that this day. This boring day. This same old same old day is brand new to them all the time…

So keep it brand new. Live each day like it's your very first day. Like its 100% of your life. Then your life will last forever or at least it'll feel that way.

Was that 7 minutes? Felt longer.