Time; Like What the F$%K?

This bad ass little contraption was made a reality in 1934 by a person with a name even cooler than his “roadable airplane”, Waldo Waterman! Affectionately called the Waterman Whatsit it was a functional plane that could tuck its ears back like a cartoon bunny and drive around town. I learned about this whilst passing a building in Santa Monica with this: Says only five were produced so that must be every one of them in that picture. 1930’s Los Angeles was absolutely nuts. Less than 100 years ago this was a thing. That used to sound like so long. My birthday just passed and I have been alive 45% of 100 years and if I’m being honest, it fucking flew by. The more time we experience the faster it seems to pass. I apologize for the unreferenced book quote, I took a picture of this page from a library book and don’t remember the one it is from.

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. Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange for the uncultured, Sherlock Holmes for those of refined taste) reads this so I highly recommend the audiobook. If Benedict read the iPhone manual I would listen to it. Carlo takes a loooong walk through the park on this one but it is fascinating and worth the trip. This book is a deep dive into how time, mass, gravity, and causality are all functions of one another. So where do I stand on the topic of time? (I ask myself to myself). It’s still an illusion so we can perceive things in sequence. However it works in the grand unified perspective is cool and all, but whoever actually said the thing about the stove nailed it. The good times fly by, the hard times drag on. Things take forever and there is never enough time. Life can be boring and burdensome but it flies by and somehow the moments always seem beautiful from far away. The physics of time fascinates me, but the phenomenon of time fulfills me. I hope you take a moment to cherish a moment once in a while too.