Way Out Where

Since we got back off of holiday about 2 weeks ago, I’ve found that every morning I’ve been about 2 minutes late for the train. It had begun to get quite annoying, as it had got to the point that I was missing trains, or having to race like mad up the stairs to the platform. Not being much of a morning person, my routine was always timed to give me the longest possible time in bed without having to rush (rushing makes my mornings significantly worse). I had always been pretty good at timing it perfectly, but since getting back off holiday, I always seemed to be a couple of minutes out. I would miss the train by 20 seconds, or find myself diving through the train doors at the last minute.

At first I put it down to the jetlag, and then to the fact that I just hadn’t quite got back into the swing of things; holiday blues. Today, I finally worked out what it actually was.

My watch was 2 minutes slow.

When we landed back at Heathrow, I set my watch time back to GMT. When we got back to the flat, I reset the radio and oven clocks (as both were turned off whilst we were away) from my watch. The whole house was 2 minutes slow, and today I just happened to be listening to the headlines at 8am when I looked at my watch, showing 7.58am.

Given that - despite occassional claims to the contrary - I’m not a complete idiot, what interested me most is why I hadn’t noticed before. It was so easy to just assume that time was an absolute. What my watch said was the time WAS the time, no questions asked. And this is true of so many things. We assume they just ARE.

I think one of the tricks to having good ideas is to be able to move out of viewing the world as absolutes; to not be tricked and blinded by the obvious.After all, how often have you heard someone utter the phrase “it was just staring me right in the face …”