When I think of displacement, I think of the old yarn about Archimedes and the tub (or was it a pool?) of water. He sat down in the bathtub, noticed the water sloshing over and out of the bathtub, somehow measured that the amount of water displaced by his body was equal to the amount of his body in the tub. Then he ran naked into the streets yelling, “Eureka!” He’d discovered a way to measure volume through buoyancy and displacement. Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant. The principle is the point.

People who cook will sometimes use this same technique on the (thankfully rare) occasion that a recipe calls for vegetable shortening. Rather than trying to spoon out a 1/4 cup of Crisco globs into a measuring cup and level it off somehow, you pour 1 cup of water into your measuring container and then add enough Crisco to get the water line up to 1 and 1/4 cups of water. Measuring by displacement.

My point: once you remove whatever’s been taking up the space—Archimedes’ water-wrinkled ass, a quarter cup of slimy white Crisco, what-have-you—you’re still left with whatever you had in the first place, but there’s often some spillage or loss of the displaced material.

This brings me to distraction; distraction is a detour. A moment of, “Hey! What’s this over here? I need to check it out!” that pulls you away from whatever you were doing or thinking, regardless of whether you want it to or not, whether or not you’re enjoying what you’re doing. Distractions are often viewed as negative things, but I feel this is yet another case of “too much of a good thing.” Distractions in moderation and used when necessary and called for are good. Sometimes you need them to refocus on things at work or in life. If all you do, though, is mess around moving from distraction to distraction while at work, this is a problem.

Distractions are a huge part of my life: not at work, but when I get home. Essentially, my entire home life is one big intentional distraction. I have several hundred books, around a hundred DVDs and a 350+ long Netflix queue with four DVDs out at a time because, quite honestly, I need to fill the hours between coming home from work and going back to work with something. The average movie provides two hours of thought-free distraction during which I am almost certain not to cry or otherwise end up giving into depression or crappy negative thoughts. A book, while sometimes harder to focus on, depending on how crappy and negative the thoughts are, can offer significantly more hours based on page count, vocabulary and plot intricacy. Between 7pm and midnight? A movie and a book? Easy. Insomnia helps/doesn’t help, depending on how I view this situation on a given day. I like reading and I like movies, so it’s not the worst possible solution.

While some people complain about not having enough hours in the day, I really feel like I have far too much time on my hands. I would love to sleep more. But I usually can’t fall asleep. I could sleep later; I’d love to - but I have to get up and get on that train. I wake up in the middle of the night and waste an hour here and there listening to the radio or reading a book; sometimes I do work because I feel guilty “wasting” that time at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. “Time is precious.”

Perhaps what I need to do is learn to displace my time rather than fill it with distractions. With distractions, the time is still there and totally unaffected; it simply has a thin veneer of something else going on above it. It’s not compressed or trickling over the edge. I may wander off for a moment, but it’s always there. Just waiting, tapping its foot and looking at a pocket-watch, I imagine. If I can displace it with some more engaging activities (though the tunnel vision right now is pretty severe and I can’t think of anything that doesn’t seem like a Herculean or Sisyphean task), perhaps a little bit will leak out here and there “Time flies when you’re having fun!”,”Where does the time go!”) and I will feel like I have far less time to use up every day.

That would be much less burdensome.