Time and taste developed – Part 1

In early childhood, it’s all about playing as the main activity. You play according to your motor skills and other conditioning factors, play with what you have at hand, like cars, dolls, balls, whatever; you play with your siblings, your neighbours, your mother, your grandmother. And you stop playing to eat, to take a bath, to take a nap and to sleep at night. The time that one spends consciously is then, as a priority, spent playing and having fun. When this is so, it is when things get nice and life is beautiful.

Once in school, things change, not everything is game anymore. There are classroom hours, minutes of recess, homework and so on. That’s when we begin to distinguish between the time we spend on what we like and the time we spend on what we don’t like, or don’t care about, or are bored with, or even bothered with. It is here that when, with greater or lesser awareness, we begin to value time: how much ten minutes of recess, how much 40 minutes of math and how much 40 minutes of music are worth. Each activity weighs different.

During puberty and/or adolescence a minority will have to develop a very intense taste for art, sport and/or science, and if they have the necessary skills, they will probably end up spending extracurricular time on their development. This minority will experience one thing that the rest of their peers will have to ignore: that time is the same for everyone and, since they have an extra goal, for them time will be more valuable. If you don’t have an intense taste for something, obviously you won’t be spending extra time with it, then the hours will probably seem the same.

But for those who are passionate about music and want to participate in a concert at the end of the year, every day is an opportunity to practice, improve and be ready for that moment. For those who want to move up from blue to red, every hour counts; they know that missing a workout will take its toll on elasticity and endurance. That is, whoever has a developed taste and is involved in that taste, ends up setting goals for itself and, when one has goals, time has a very precise value, as punctual as possible.

On the other hand, just as the one who has developed taste enjoys spending his leisure hours in that taste, for which he has not developed any, leisure hours can become torture. This is where the first divergence appears, the first natural separation between those who value time and those who do not because they do not know what to invest it in. Adults who do not have a developed taste often become evident because they do not know how to value their own or others’ time. It’s usually the ones who are usually late, the ones who are usually unpunctual.