Category Archives: time

On panic

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Often times, in the middle of a crisis–the planet is about to be destroyed right out from under you, for example–it is too easy to just panic and lose one’s head, do something stupid. One should never let the adrenaline decide anything for you. Panic is the worst thing there is for problem solving because it immediately blinds you to all possible solutions. I find panic is worse when I feel out-of-control, which is most of the time, but panic also encourages you to think that you have control at all. Thinking you are in control is the worst kind of illusion under which you might operate, and panic arises out of the illusion that you can control anything at all. Most all panic can be avoided if we can just keep our whits about us, breath deeply, sip a cold beverage, and, in most cases, just do nothing at all. Decisions made in haste under panic conditions are almost always bad decisions. I would venture to guess that almost anything done in panic should never have been done at all. In fact, most of the time, doing nothing is the best thing to do. Put off your decision, sleep on it, give it some time to mature, let it disappear on its own, or let it resolve itself with no intervention on your part at all. Panicking is for unexperienced amateurs who really don’t understand the wisdom of time and space, and that giving yourself both will often lead to a lucid and less emotional solution that is good for everyone. Most of the things in life that lead to panic are usually the intranscendent trivia that have nothing to do with anything important at all. In fact, most of the stuff that makes us panic can very often be ignored altogether. The second you start to rush things, everything goes badly very quickly.

On panic

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Often times, in the middle of a crisis–the planet is about to be destroyed right out from under you, for example–it is too easy to just panic and lose one’s head, do something stupid. One should never let the adrenaline decide anything for you. Panic is the worst thing there is for problem solving because it immediately blinds you to all possible solutions. I find panic is worse when I feel out-of-control, which is most of the time, but panic also encourages you to think that you have control at all. Thinking you are in control is the worst kind of illusion under which you might operate, and panic arises out of the illusion that you can control anything at all. Most all panic can be avoided if we can just keep our whits about us, breath deeply, sip a cold beverage, and, in most cases, just do nothing at all. Decisions made in haste under panic conditions are almost always bad decisions. I would venture to guess that almost anything done in panic should never have been done at all. In fact, most of the time, doing nothing is the best thing to do. Put off your decision, sleep on it, give it some time to mature, let it disappear on its own, or let it resolve itself with no intervention on your part at all. Panicking is for unexperienced amateurs who really don’t understand the wisdom of time and space, and that giving yourself both will often lead to a lucid and less emotional solution that is good for everyone. Most of the things in life that lead to panic are usually the intranscendent trivia that have nothing to do with anything important at all. In fact, most of the stuff that makes us panic can very often be ignored altogether. The second you start to rush things, everything goes badly very quickly.

On walking in the cold rain

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Walking in the cold rain today between tasks gave me the opportunity to cool off, collect my thoughts, ponder the week that was just ending. December is a strange time, filled with change, the end of a semester, people leaving, some dying, others moving on, still others are new on the scene. Perhaps no other month is filled the transitions that December brings, and today’s cold rain gave me pause to think about those who had just left and those who are just arriving. The cold rain fell on both the just and the unjust alike today, and on the just plain tired as well. The students scurried to their exams, some going to their final final exams, graduating in just over a week–they too are in transition in the cold and rain. The cold and rain are cloaked in nostalgia, the same now as thirty years ago, or maybe even fifty years ago as I head into class, kindergarten, wearing a corduroy coat and a hat, mittens. The cold and rain span a half century of memories that seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye. The cold and rain are the same now as they were then, comforting in the sense that although I have changed, the rain has not. The cold keeps the mind sharp, the senses wide open, the heart warm, and the nose cold. The passage of time is illusory, and although the calendar tells me that time is passing, I know that time and calendars are only arbitrary and illusory social constructions without meaning. Only the cold rain is real.

On walking in the cold rain

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Walking in the cold rain today between tasks gave me the opportunity to cool off, collect my thoughts, ponder the week that was just ending. December is a strange time, filled with change, the end of a semester, people leaving, some dying, others moving on, still others are new on the scene. Perhaps no other month is filled the transitions that December brings, and today’s cold rain gave me pause to think about those who had just left and those who are just arriving. The cold rain fell on both the just and the unjust alike today, and on the just plain tired as well. The students scurried to their exams, some going to their final final exams, graduating in just over a week–they too are in transition in the cold and rain. The cold and rain are cloaked in nostalgia, the same now as thirty years ago, or maybe even fifty years ago as I head into class, kindergarten, wearing a corduroy coat and a hat, mittens. The cold and rain span a half century of memories that seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye. The cold and rain are the same now as they were then, comforting in the sense that although I have changed, the rain has not. The cold keeps the mind sharp, the senses wide open, the heart warm, and the nose cold. The passage of time is illusory, and although the calendar tells me that time is passing, I know that time and calendars are only arbitrary and illusory social constructions without meaning. Only the cold rain is real.

On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

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You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.

On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

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You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.

On 11:59 pm

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Do you ever wonder why the clock has twenty-four hours, hours being sixty minutes, minutes being sixty seconds? What I love about the way we tell time is that it is so arbitrary and so irrational it could be a paradigm for the human mind. Sixty seconds, sixty minutes, twenty-four hours? Could we have picked up a more odd-ball scheme of weird combinations and divisions. What is so utterly irrational about the way we measure time is that a day isn’t really twenty-four hours–it’s always a couple of second off. What is totally irrational about our time keeping system is how we imbue meaning with different hours of the day, when we eat, start work, get off work, when we get up, when we go to bed. It’s after midnight now, and I should be in bed, but I’m not. I’m not the only one who stays up late. The clock has little influence over me at night, but during the day it sure has me chasing my tail. Today was the perfect example of having to hit certain marks in order to avoid total chaos. I sometimes feel like I’m a bit of a slave to the clock, which is a feeling I definitely don’t like. Midnight is the witching hour, but that is only so much bunkum and huey. The actually meaning of the clock is zero, nothing. The hours and minutes which we so carefully count and measure have no intrinsic value other than periods of time, and even that idea is a strange one–time moves forward? We create all of these linguistic conventions which drive our thinking in certain directions, but who’s to say that time doesn’t really move backwards? I have no idea if that last idea makes any sense at all. Time moves in a direction? Can we prove this? Is time a thing? Or a construct derived from the linguistic patterns of our verb system–past, present and future? Wouldn’t it be great if we could make time stand still while we finished a particularly problematic task? Or do we bend under our metaphors and acquiese to the idea that time flows like a river, and all rivers lead to the ocean, which is death. The passage of time marks our own mortality, one way or the other, as we get older, count hours, days, weeks, years–our system just gets nuttier, no saner–we get closer and closer to that mortal tomb where someone, someday, will drop our bones. For some time is the enemy–plastic surgery, exercise, diets, hormones–for others it is a close friend. The minute before midnight, the last minute of the day is like an abandoned, rusty old car that sits out on the highway of time, lost in its own solitude. No one ever plans lunch for this hour, dates are mostly over by this time, for better or worse, nobody plans a meeting for 11:59 pm. It might be a good name for a dog or horse, but I’m afraid you would end up shortening it to “Elev,” which is rather unsatisfying. Our time system is crazy. Maybe we just need to get over it. It is so ingrained, however, in our collective psyche that it is impossible to change it. The disruption caused by trying to reform our current crazy cat system of base psycho would be so great that the world would probably stop. Wrist watches would be useless, especially the round analogue variety which are so popular with my generation. People using digital watches can go do whatever they want because the digital watch is a bit of a paradox anyway. Why digitize an essentially nutty and arbitrary system at all? The best part of our time keeping system? No one ever questions the irrational complexity of the system in the first place. Let’s just make up a new system–one day, ten hours, each hour is a hundred new minutes, each minute a hundred new seconds. Make it fit the rotation of the earth the best you can. Now that is completely arbitrary, but it’s rational arbitrary and much easier to understand–no a.m. or p.m.

On 11:59 pm

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Do you ever wonder why the clock has twenty-four hours, hours being sixty minutes, minutes being sixty seconds? What I love about the way we tell time is that it is so arbitrary and so irrational it could be a paradigm for the human mind. Sixty seconds, sixty minutes, twenty-four hours? Could we have picked up a more odd-ball scheme of weird combinations and divisions. What is so utterly irrational about the way we measure time is that a day isn’t really twenty-four hours–it’s always a couple of second off. What is totally irrational about our time keeping system is how we imbue meaning with different hours of the day, when we eat, start work, get off work, when we get up, when we go to bed. It’s after midnight now, and I should be in bed, but I’m not. I’m not the only one who stays up late. The clock has little influence over me at night, but during the day it sure has me chasing my tail. Today was the perfect example of having to hit certain marks in order to avoid total chaos. I sometimes feel like I’m a bit of a slave to the clock, which is a feeling I definitely don’t like. Midnight is the witching hour, but that is only so much bunkum and huey. The actually meaning of the clock is zero, nothing. The hours and minutes which we so carefully count and measure have no intrinsic value other than periods of time, and even that idea is a strange one–time moves forward? We create all of these linguistic conventions which drive our thinking in certain directions, but who’s to say that time doesn’t really move backwards? I have no idea if that last idea makes any sense at all. Time moves in a direction? Can we prove this? Is time a thing? Or a construct derived from the linguistic patterns of our verb system–past, present and future? Wouldn’t it be great if we could make time stand still while we finished a particularly problematic task? Or do we bend under our metaphors and acquiese to the idea that time flows like a river, and all rivers lead to the ocean, which is death. The passage of time marks our own mortality, one way or the other, as we get older, count hours, days, weeks, years–our system just gets nuttier, no saner–we get closer and closer to that mortal tomb where someone, someday, will drop our bones. For some time is the enemy–plastic surgery, exercise, diets, hormones–for others it is a close friend. The minute before midnight, the last minute of the day is like an abandoned, rusty old car that sits out on the highway of time, lost in its own solitude. No one ever plans lunch for this hour, dates are mostly over by this time, for better or worse, nobody plans a meeting for 11:59 pm. It might be a good name for a dog or horse, but I’m afraid you would end up shortening it to “Elev,” which is rather unsatisfying. Our time system is crazy. Maybe we just need to get over it. It is so ingrained, however, in our collective psyche that it is impossible to change it. The disruption caused by trying to reform our current crazy cat system of base psycho would be so great that the world would probably stop. Wrist watches would be useless, especially the round analogue variety which are so popular with my generation. People using digital watches can go do whatever they want because the digital watch is a bit of a paradox anyway. Why digitize an essentially nutty and arbitrary system at all? The best part of our time keeping system? No one ever questions the irrational complexity of the system in the first place. Let’s just make up a new system–one day, ten hours, each hour is a hundred new minutes, each minute a hundred new seconds. Make it fit the rotation of the earth the best you can. Now that is completely arbitrary, but it’s rational arbitrary and much easier to understand–no a.m. or p.m.

On the strange paradox of time travel

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Just like the next guy, I love a great time travel paradox, frustrated by the fact that hypothetically a return to the past is possible, doubly frustrated that the real world doesn’t seem to understand the hypothesis. Time travel equations seem to indicate that time runs both forward and backward, but our reality only seems to run one way, which is why the equations are deceptive. A cup that has been knocked onto the floor and breaks stays broken, and unless you have a good supply of superglue, the cup will stay broken. Yet I am skeptical that even if we could go back in time and avoid breaking the cup altogether, we should. Since our past is filled with so many errors, follies, and foolishness, I don’t think there is enough time in the world to fix them. You would have to answer the question, which errors would be worth correcting, but the bigger question remains: if you fix a mistake, what might the “butterfly effects” be? Precisely because you have corrected a perceived error, have you inadvertently created others? Is it possible that you might disappear if a mistake in 1789 were corrected? The answer, of course, is yes. Since the only timeline that we know is the result of millions of individual mistakes, we must leave history as it is because we have no conception of the possible dangers of changing the most minimal detail in the past. Well, you say, what about big mistakes such as Hitler? It is hard to imagine a world in which Hitler never lived, but then again, the current world we have now is a direct result, for better or worse, of many of Hitler’s policies and decisions. How would his death as an infant effect us now? The answer, of course, is unknowable, unfathomable, but at the same time, intriguing. So the cup falls, breaks, and gets swept into the trash, and we are unable to avoid it’s destruction. We are the result of a single direction causality stream of which we are completely unaware at any given moment, but that, with hindsight, we describe after the fact as history. Of course, a causality stream is also a bit of a mystery because human interaction, although predictable within certain chaotic parameters, is essentially unpredictable at the macro-level, is essentially unpredictable at any given moment, and if we were to run the same causality scenario at any given moment, the outcomes may be radically different. If we were to time travel, we would always be in danger of introducing new factors into the time equation. “Back to the Future” reminds us only too well that even one’s best intentions can screw up a carefully built series of causes and effects. I fear that the impossibility of time travel may be for our own good, and that if we could time travel, that this might be the end of the world as we know it. The biggest problem I see is going back and meeting your own younger self and contaminating the future or possibly even causing yourself to disappear at some point. The cup falls, breaks, and gets swept into the trash. You go to the store to replace the cup, meet a new person, fall in love, get married, have children, one of whom becomes the president of the United States who averts a world-ending atomic holocaust, and you die of old age in your bed at age 102 after 76 years of marriage to a wonderful person who you met after breaking a tea cup. You avoid breaking the cup, you never go to the store, you never get married, you live alone, never having had children, dying in an atomic holocaust that ends life on this planet as we know it. It’s complicated, isn’t it?

On the strange paradox of time travel

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Just like the next guy, I love a great time travel paradox, frustrated by the fact that hypothetically a return to the past is possible, doubly frustrated that the real world doesn’t seem to understand the hypothesis. Time travel equations seem to indicate that time runs both forward and backward, but our reality only seems to run one way, which is why the equations are deceptive. A cup that has been knocked onto the floor and breaks stays broken, and unless you have a good supply of superglue, the cup will stay broken. Yet I am skeptical that even if we could go back in time and avoid breaking the cup altogether, we should. Since our past is filled with so many errors, follies, and foolishness, I don’t think there is enough time in the world to fix them. You would have to answer the question, which errors would be worth correcting, but the bigger question remains: if you fix a mistake, what might the “butterfly effects” be? Precisely because you have corrected a perceived error, have you inadvertently created others? Is it possible that you might disappear if a mistake in 1789 were corrected? The answer, of course, is yes. Since the only timeline that we know is the result of millions of individual mistakes, we must leave history as it is because we have no conception of the possible dangers of changing the most minimal detail in the past. Well, you say, what about big mistakes such as Hitler? It is hard to imagine a world in which Hitler never lived, but then again, the current world we have now is a direct result, for better or worse, of many of Hitler’s policies and decisions. How would his death as an infant effect us now? The answer, of course, is unknowable, unfathomable, but at the same time, intriguing. So the cup falls, breaks, and gets swept into the trash, and we are unable to avoid it’s destruction. We are the result of a single direction causality stream of which we are completely unaware at any given moment, but that, with hindsight, we describe after the fact as history. Of course, a causality stream is also a bit of a mystery because human interaction, although predictable within certain chaotic parameters, is essentially unpredictable at the macro-level, is essentially unpredictable at any given moment, and if we were to run the same causality scenario at any given moment, the outcomes may be radically different. If we were to time travel, we would always be in danger of introducing new factors into the time equation. “Back to the Future” reminds us only too well that even one’s best intentions can screw up a carefully built series of causes and effects. I fear that the impossibility of time travel may be for our own good, and that if we could time travel, that this might be the end of the world as we know it. The biggest problem I see is going back and meeting your own younger self and contaminating the future or possibly even causing yourself to disappear at some point. The cup falls, breaks, and gets swept into the trash. You go to the store to replace the cup, meet a new person, fall in love, get married, have children, one of whom becomes the president of the United States who averts a world-ending atomic holocaust, and you die of old age in your bed at age 102 after 76 years of marriage to a wonderful person who you met after breaking a tea cup. You avoid breaking the cup, you never go to the store, you never get married, you live alone, never having had children, dying in an atomic holocaust that ends life on this planet as we know it. It’s complicated, isn’t it?