The Speed of Time | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2005.01.18
The year 2005 has begun. This year again, on New Year's Day, I attended the New Year's party in the Endo-Nishi district with Dean Kojima, Dean Kumasaka, Dean Yoshino, and Councilor Nishino. Professor Yoshino has reported on the event in detail, so I will just post a photo as proof.
Now, there is something I think about every time the New Year arrives. It is that each year feels shorter and shorter to me. In my family, we have a tradition of going together for the first shrine visit of the New Year (hatsumode) ever since we returned to Japan. When we happened to have the time, we even indulged in visiting three places—Kamakura Hachimangu, Senso-ji, and Yushima Tenjin—and the first three days of the New Year are a precious time to enjoy delicious food and have a pleasant, "relaxed" time.
I feel that the "speed of time" as my body perceives it accelerates in proportion to the "amount of work." Of course, I had heard about this phenomenon from many of our predecessors. However, I don't know a good way to slow down this perceived speed. The idea of improving one's work processing ability to quickly handle any task seems logical at first glance, but in reality, even more work just seems to bubble up or rain down.
When I go on business trips to places like the University of Cambridge, where I have friends, I notice that not only the campus atmosphere but also the clock around me seems to be ticking more slowly. This is partly because I am freed from miscellaneous tasks, but I think it is also largely due to the culture of the campus, such as afternoon tea time, walking paths in the gardens, and art museums. It is far more relaxed than SFC or CMU.
My challenge is how to create this "sense of relaxation" or how to win it back from a packed schedule. For those of us who spend a lot of time on an intellectually stimulating campus like SFC, this is a good opportunity to reconsider our campus life. Besides eliminating that terrible smell, I wonder if time would flow more slowly if we were inside the Super Air Shelter installed at SFC?
Even if the Super Air Shelter is not feasible, we probably need to embed more and more "cultural devices" into daily life on campus. I would like to install them everywhere—in classrooms, meeting rooms, cafeterias, the Media Center, and so on. Of course, the balance of our minds and bodies must not be disrupted. Otherwise, any cultural device would become completely meaningless.
Perhaps one of the challenges for SFC, now in its 16th year, is also this "sense of relaxation."
(Date of publication: 2005/01/18)