Al Stewart, PBS, Steppenwolf, The Vaughn Brothers, your brain, your life, and the unerring passage of time.
"Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone - those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us - a chasm whose depth we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if things that irritate us lasted." Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (emphasis mine)
Marcus was born April 26, 121 CE, in Rome, Italy. He died March 17, 180 CE, and was the Roman emperor from 161–180. This view of time has survived for the last 1,900 years or so. To us, that seems like a looooong time. Related to history, it is a pimple on the backside of the elephant. Our particular form seems to have been around for 550,000-750,000 years, for example.
Quantum physics and quantum chemistry, as we learn more, are altering much of our prior scientific thinking. The properties of time, at least for now, remain stable. We cannot change it or manufacture it even though it is relative and we can, sort of, speed it up or slow it down. We are most definitely, all of us, time traveling into the future, second by second. We have not determined whether we can time travel to the past. Maybe we get a second or third or fourth life. We will find that out when this life ends. Counting on that seems like a poor strategy, though. And then there is the thought that this is all a creation of our brain.
Some philosophers and physicists have argued that what we experience as time is just an illusion, an artifact of our consciousness. In this view, the passage of time isn't real; the past and future already exist in their complete extent, the same way the entirety of space already exists. What we sense as the flow of time is a byproduct of the way our brains work as we process sensory information from our environment, according to physicist Sean Carroll.
We have something approaching 90 billion neurons. Ninety billion inches is equal to 7.5 billion feet. That is 1,420,455 miles or 5.95 trips to the Moon (the average distance to the Moon, which has an elliptical orbit, is about 239,000 miles), or somewhere around 919 drives of 1,545 miles from Maine to Florida. Your brain is constantly making new connections between neurons. We have no idea how thoughts are created or how they are assembled into inventions. Your memory? Hah! Each time your recall a memory, you change it. And you store it in a different location. So what you remember the most often is arguably irreversibly altered from the original memory. And what of the actual facts and how you might have perceived and therefore altered those as you were storing them? It is entirely conceivable and more likely a fact that we have no reality that is unmodified, imperceptibly, by the immense power of our brain, and all the while The Vaughn Brothers are telling us: “tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time slippin’ away”.
Thinking About Thinking
We can think all day about thinking and agonize over everything. We have, since the inception of the thought of the USA, endured a Revolutionary War, a Civil War, the Spanish flu, the Depression, WWI, WWII, impeachment, a banking crisis, the GFC, and COVID, to name just a few things. One side of the brain jumps wildly negative, thinking the next disaster is coming - go into full protection mode! The other leans toward the thought that we survived all of this - we can make anything happen. And time marches on, relentlessly.
You have to believe in some better (or positive) future to be motivated to act, to take risk, to take on potential failure, to start over when you fail, to quit what is not working and start something that might work.
It's so easy to do nothin'
When you're busy night and day
Take a step in one direction
And take a step the other way
So don't stop tryin' when you stumble
Don't give up should you fall
Keep on searchin' for the passway
That will lead you through the wall
Don't look back or you'll be left behind
Don't look back or you will never find peace of mind
Make the most of your time - do what matters to you in your heart and soul. The probability that you can find or make more, or that you get a mulligan, is extremely low. Time is your only real asset. It is unrecoverable and constantly depleting. We can make more money. We can build more houses or a new society. We can recover from world war. There is no more time for you and I, not yet, at least. Whatever you intend to get done, get it done now. You can savor it while you move on through time.
Sundry:
The US Women’s Open golf tournament is this weekend. Want to watch awesome golf and incredible athletes? Watch it here.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (“All the Light We Cannot See”) is an incredible read. It brings together the physics of spooky action at a distance with history, societal issues, and humanity over time.
I’m an old auto mechanic, high-performance car lover, and not yet a convert to EV. I love how torque/acceleration and speed/horsepower build versus the instant on of the EV. I want to understand the ecological soundness of battery versus internal combustion and have yet to take the time to do so. However, the Ionic 5 might convert me.
Prince was an amazing musician.
A most powerful word is the word "be." As in "just be" or "be still." All ways to artificially slow or stop time. Some mantra:
Be Present - experience the wonder of now and what's around you
Be the Least - put others first, and you'll discover that to be selfish is actually to serve others
Be Empty - The less that occupies your mind, the more you can fill it up with what's around you