movement activates reality’s most powerful tool: randomness
once you take intuitively-charged action, the universe conspires with you to guide the random bits in your favor.
this piece is inspired by a sideways look at time (aslat).
aslat starts with a scathing diatribe against our modern conception of time. imploring you to imagine that time may be more than seconds ticking on a clock. that a singular vision of time is unhealthy for self and society. a light suggestion that even more could be “accomplished” (a non-capitalist version) if we retrain ourselves to have a fluid understanding of time just as with any relationship (human or animal or computer or job or city or club, etc).
we are wasting astronomically more time by counting it.
there’s little room for a rich relationship with time when its character changes every second, while having essentially no character at all by being the most abstract thing.
carl linnaeus created a clock that tells the time by the blooms of different flowers. imagine temporally orienting yourself throughout the day by looking at flowers, taking in color, diversity, personality, beauty, uncertainty.
the divisiveness of time saddens me greatly. the over-categorization that leads to hate and haste is disgusting. it is one of our creations, just like any other tool. it’s no more artificial than flint or arrowhead. it is simply something that is possible when collective consciousness is aligned specifically.
there are other alignments.
and they will have tradeoffs just as this one does.
perfection is oscillation, not beauty imprisoned between moments, stagnant.
modern time is beautiful in its abstract power. yet, we trap it with every tick of a clock and its beauty wilts a trillion.
obsession with a single alignment, an unyielding version of time, limits possibility. the domain of potential experience shrinks. bored? want something new? start challenging your basic assumptions, including time.
rather than casting it as colorless and bleak, i prefer to think of it as gorgeously simplistic: the awesome void of color that is black and the celebration of all color that is white.
a beautiful geometric duality, simple, elegant, comfortable. yet ready to blossom, bursting diverse from the calm center. an intricate flowering fractal moment.
and just think of that transition, that threshold!
to behold such a thing is the reason for being (aware).
the global 24-hour day didn’t start until 1884 with the establishment of mean time in the UK city of greenwich. before this moment, time had never been imposed by government. and on april 14, 1912 the rest of the world accepted the new law.
the eiffel tower wirelessly transmits global time’s first pip in july 1913.
and with the media on board to portray fragmented, over-quantized time, money and time were tightly bound. survival and efficiency newly linked. an incentive to over-scrutinize, over-categorize, and over-evaluate each moment.
micro-pipped time induces anxiety. the year after the inauguration of global time, the world goes to war with itself, twitching in fear over the idea of losing time (now synonymous with money & power) to others.
the greeks had two gods of time. chronos, god of linear, quantifiable time. and kairos, god of serendipity, opportunity, subjective, kismet time. both given due respect and acknowledgement.
chronological time has usurped kairological time in our time.
you could say precision time is a mistake. you could say it destroys connection to nature, to purpose. yet it is a feature of existence. it is a personality trait of the universe. it is part of you and you are part of it. it must be known, it must be felt, it wants to be. because the universe wants to look inward and see everything and all of itself.
the book is a bit of candy. an innate topic. something critical — so easy to write on, so easy to connect with any concept, any purpose, any action. a jaunt through the mind-land of the time dimension of reality’s manifestations.
from hinduism to WWI, from james joyce to virginia woolfe, from the physics of einsten to the gods of ancient greece, we ride.
only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.
— wittgenstein
there are things accessible only in the dry abstract of precision time. and the opposite is true. neither is better than the other. the sorrow is when one time-eye is always favored over the other — stagnating creative energy.
can you intellectualize yourself out of your overly abstract mind? can you sail around the circle and end up back again in the eternity of a duration?
on consideration, precisely defining time creates a lot of consternation.
impatience, agitation, fear of the uncertain future,
competition with and isolation from your neighbors,
bleary-eyed autopilot,
despair of depressing repetitiveness—
most moments constantly devalued,
distinctiveness deigned divine,
pallidly ignoring each moment’s persistent reminders that
the contrary also deserves space.
let’s support each other, not ad companies. 🌞
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