-compressed.jpg)
Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.
Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
subscribe
rss Feeds
The SECOND illustrated book from Tinkered Thinking is now available!
SPIN CHESS
A Chess app from Tinkered Thinking featuring a variant of chess that bridges all skill levels!
REPAUSE
A meditation app is forthcoming. Stay Tuned.
HOURGLASS
April 10th, 2019
More so than all human conventions, the two things that exert a tremendous non-negotiable force upon our lives are gravity and time.
It’s perhaps fitting that one of our first inventions to measure one was done so by harnessing the other: namely gravity is used in the hourglass to measure time.
While the extrapolations of advanced physics seem to indicate that these forces are perhaps pliable in extreme circumstances, either through speed or proximity to mass, as time and gravity relate to the average person here on earth, they are reliable and unapologetic constants.
Beyond any god or creed, faith in gravity and the passage of time is so innate to our experience that we do not even question our relation to such forces through something as counter-intuitive as ‘faith’.
And yet, even advanced physics struggles to provide a satisfying description as to exactly how and why time and gravity function as they do. These forces are incredibly reliable without giving up their secrets. Through this puzzling lens, such forces almost sound supernatural, and yet they comprise two of the most fundamental aspects of what is natural.
Regardless of what mechanics reside within these black boxes, it is their reliability and juggernaut consistency that we must keep front and center while negotiating what we do in life. Time pushes us forward, no matter how much we kick and scream, no matter how paralyzed we feel, no matter how nostalgic we are for the past nor how much we dread the future.
Memory and imagination, no matter how flawed they be are the only weapons we have against this interminable march.
One linking us to times now past and the other a cloud of what might be.
We are essentially force fed with memories of our ability or inability to make the best of the moment.
Best to Pause and use that present moment for an honest assessment about how that present moment is usually used.
Because unlike an hourglass that can be flipped and started over,
there is no flipping life and starting again.
