
Waterman Aerobile, (A19610156000), on display in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Smithsonian, Chantilly, Va. Smithsonian Photo by Eric Long [B0009694] [NASM2020-00139]

1. Count your blessings and gratitudes at the start of every day, and then give yourself concentrated time with them by writing them down. 2. Cultivate optimism by choosing beforehand to look on the bright side of situations, events, and future possibilities. 3. Negate the negative by deliberately limiting time spent dwelling on problems or on unhealthy comparisons with others.
I am experimenting with some deeper dives into topics I feel I have thought about extensively enough to share an opinion. So let’s start with the theme of the previous list; time.
Any primitive lifeform experiences one version of time. The here and now. The moment. This very moment that in reality does not exist. A moment in time is the quotient of the past and future. It’s not a thing. Just the razor’s edge between the future and the past. A moment exists in hindsight. I recently came across a notebook of mine from circa 2000. At this point of my life I was convinced that time did not exist except as a way to describe the order things occurred in. All these years later I hear how that statement cancels itself. “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” -(Turns out not) Albert Einstein I was not all that great at math, yet was overcome with youthful confidence. I fell into the trap of believing untruths coupled with supreme overconfidence in my beliefs. A perfect example being I fully believed Einstein said the quote above. It sounds like something a smart person would say. My whole life has been a lie. I mean, time is confusing and elusive, and any type of understanding sits on the other side of some insanely difficult math. So who is going to challenge the notion that time is exactly what it seems to be; just an idea. Simply a linguistic tool allowing us to describe the order of how the past played out. It’s not. In the years since I have become good enough at math to know exactly how hard and boring it is. I am grateful it triggers the dopamine switch in some people, for me it does not. It feels like sitting on a hot stove for hours.FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS:
So I do the next best thing. I read books written by smart people. One of which is appropriately titled.