Sassafras Roots

I recently started reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. There are plenty of articles and interviews to read about the book and the author, so I won't bore you with details you can find better written elsewhere. I do want to share a recent self discovery as it relates to the book's material. 

I have lived by the following quote for what seems like about the past ten years: "Time you enjoy is never wasted." I forget where I heard that quote first. At this point, I may have said it so many times that a historian may credit me with creating the phrase. I think it's still relevant to my outlook today. Thanks to the message I'm picking up from Four Thousand Weeks, I'd offer an even simpler take: "Time is never wasted." 

Time is never "wasted", at all, because it can't ever really be "spent" as if it's a currency that you can have more or less of at any given instant. (How would it even be possible to "have" time in an instant?) Time is it. That is, your experience, any given moment in which you can exist, is time. The accumulation of moments appears to be a unidirectional and linear flow of time for how we "pass through it". Really, instead of thinking of time as some currency, it's more like an integral from calculus. 

All the moments you've experienced, in "deep time" as some call it, make up your life, sum into this integral. No measure of years, months, days, minutes, seconds, or smaller, can accurately and consistently describe this accrual. If, for instance, you spent a year grieving, you'd probably accrue many fewer moments to remember because of being in a lower energy state, but you'd "have" plenty of time to reflect on past moments. That year will not have gone any faster or slower by scientific measures. It may feel a lot slower from the lack of punctuated events in life. But it'd be ample time to review the story told so far, a fine activity in this lower energy state. (All this, I should add, requires ample rest. No need to force oneself into accruing more memories. There's no room for that in this state.) 

Don't worry too much about "being fully in the moment" or "being here now". You're always now, and you're always here. There's no way to do it "right" or "wrong". You might remember some moments better. Those are the ones to reflect on and appreciate anyway. 

Thank you for "spending" your time to read this blog post. Maybe it bored you or scared you in thinking about time an unconventional way. Maybe you had an enjoyable moment.

I Wish There Were Fewer Manifestos

Anyone else feel like there are too many manifestos out there? I'm not even talking about the horrid kind left behind by mass murderers, I'm also talking about manifestos of corporations, non-profit organizations, books in your book clubs, and political movements.

One of the greatest things there is is to not know. To live with wonder about an infinite universe is humbling and calming. There is so, so much that each one of us doesn't know anything about. Why prize what we claim to believe or find "true" when it's not even a sizable fraction of what's left unknown?

A manifesto demands adherence, some shared set of beliefs. The thing is, no one ever really fully buys into a statement of shared beliefs. Some statements we can tolerate being around even if we don't agree. Some we really don't agree with. Some things we accept in disagreement out of convenience or exhaustion. More often than not it's the idea of someone who's really bought in, and the rest follow along thinking they'll maybe get something out of it. If not everyone's bought in, why use language like "we" in your statements?

The next time you're reading a manifesto, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that?" Maybe you'll find out you don't. I encourage your independent discovery.

Shameless Recommendations 2021-08-17

1. Read Why Fish Don't Exist, and don't read anything about the book before starting it.
2. Play Baba Is You. It's available for major computing platforms, smart mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch. If you get stuck, don't cheat! That ruins the whole point of the game. Instead, check out guiding hint sites like Baba Is Hint which help you think about how the game works instead of giving away the solution.
3. Get a therapist or counselor even if you don't think you need one. Really. If there's nothing "bad" or "painful" to talk about, you might still learn about yourself and learn to think about your own thoughts differently with a therapist's help. If things are already bad, it totally sucks to jump through all the hoops and forms and insurance and such to get connected with a therapist. Get started with therapy before your energy state is super low from grief, trauma, depression, anxiety, whatever. Future you will thank you.
4. Eat Joe Chips. Serious but non-damaging crunch with just the right amount of give, excellent flavor dusting. Try out the assorted chips linked, and learn what your favorite flavor is. The BBQ flavor of Joe Chips (BBQ is generally my favorite chip flavor) has just the perfect balance of salt, smoke, spice, and sugar. I have not encountered anything else out there so balanced. BBQ chips are often too smoky (I usually pass up "mesquite" labeling) or not sweet enough. Not BBQ Joe Chips.
5. Go on a walk through a forest or park, and try to find one object of each color of the rainbow. Maybe you'll find a red leaf or an orange peel, or even a yellow dandelion. Make a note of your discoveries somewhere, or even take photos of each object of each color and arrange them to form your own lovely ROYGBIV. This exercise was adapted from Why Fish Don't Exist, but it doesn't spoil anything, I promise.
   

Old Internet Will Make a Comeback

You heard it here first! (Maybe not.) Old Internet activities like Blogger and LiveJournal are going to be hot again. Longform soliloquies like this one will become popular forms of expression again as we tire of our uncles having something to say about everything on social media platforms. Widely-supported, probably-already-installed, instant-loading fonts like Verdana will make a comeback, and expensive fonts like Circular which have to be downloaded and slow down page loads will fall out of favor. Maybe this time these newly-hot old platforms will benefit from wide support for emoji. 🔥 (Maybe not.) I betcha there will be some "new" site that replicates the experiences of these classic platforms.

How refreshing that Old Internet sites load pretty much instantly. The Servo or V8 or WebKit engine in your browser is overengineered to load and execute poorly-written JavaScript faster than it really should run. It's not just the web developers' faults though; basically all software is enormous and slow these days. If you keep your site simple and low-tech, it's like driving to the corner store to get some milk with a souped-up Ferrari, which is a funny image. (But did we really need the Ferrari in the first place?) Maybe just keep it simple and low-tech because all computers require energy to run and we ought to be responsible about energy consumption. "Call 4-H to find out how you can do your part."

(My favorite part of Old Internet? Hyperlinks! Maybe I just wish web pages thought of themselves as simple documents on the greater World Wide Web instead of be-all, end-all experiences. You might have already guessed that I don't think Facebook is the bee's knees.)

Go grab a stopwatch, click this link, and start the stopwatch. You can stop the stopwatch when the page finishes loading. How long did it take to load?

If You Want to Write

Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write has brought me back from spiraling nothingness before, and gosh darn it, it's gonna do it again.