I got upstairs to discover a copy of Avatar and Mad Men: Season 3, Disc 4.  Seeing as how the new season of Mad Men had started up – I was excited to catch-up.  The only problem was I couldn’t remember what in the world had happened on Disc 3, or even 2 for that matter.  “When was the last time I watched Mad Men?” I thought – as I recalled having a rather solid video-rental routine at one point.

I logged onto netflix.com – and checked my order history to find out.  It turned out the two videos I’d just sent back had originally arrived the first week of May.  A week later, my dear friend Kendra passed away.

Sometimes you don’t realize what you’re doing and what is happening until you recognize something is very out of place.  It appears my habits took a radical change that second week in May. I seem to recall that I was going to the gym every morning for five months prior.  I have been there four times since. The company was on a major up-swing in productivity and sales.  I’ve been apologizing WAY too much lately.

Weight loss… gone.
Financial stability… gone.
Structured life… very gone.

Now of course, it hasn’t been all bad.  In fact, it’s been quite good.  I can’t say I’m depressed – I got to go to Ireland with my Dad for two weeks on one of the great trips of my life.  But when you know the type of life you want to be living, and you suddenly discover you aren’t currently living it – it’s a jarring moment.  It’s not as if I’ve been laying on the couch growing a beard in the dark – quite the opposite.  This is probably a main reason I hadn’t realized just how far from the target I was. I was living in between – going through the motions and just sort of half existing.  Responsibilities seemingly lost meaning, and excuses seemed plentiful.  Never did I associate a starting point with any of this – the moment simply seemed as it was – that this is how I lived.

However – the first step is always the realization of what is occurring.  The Netflix incident opened my eyes and provided a moment of clarity – a glaring “this isn’t right” that made me wonder, how long has it been wrong? Suddenly other hints are starting to shine as I try to account for the past couple months.  Knowing the starting point helps clarify the mis-steps – but doesn’t always define a root cause. And certainly Kendra wouldn’t cut me much slack for a three month pity party – so no excuses there! There is some major clean-up ahead. However, the pathway back to where I want to be isn’t hard to find.  Occasionally tough to walk – and it’s understandable if personal tragedy slows down the pace. But time will not wait, and neither can I.

I miss you Kendra!

When I was a freshman in high school I began making a lot of observations and conjectures about what was actually going on here.  While most boys my age had girls on the mind – I became obsessed with the nature of reality. I had become a devout atheist in middle school, but being unsatisfied with silently disagreeing with those around me – I decided my time was better spent trying to figure out what was actually occurring – why I was here and why thing were the way they appeared.

A particular observation that haunted me occurred one evening at the little league field in my home town.  While I was a right-fielder in every sense of the sport when suited up – and thus have always disliked the game immensely – going to the little league field in Cornwall NY was just about the only fun thing in town – and many summer nights were spent at the complex walking between the various fields.  From certain spots you could witness multiple fields, and multiple games over the complex.  On one particular evening I began taking notice of the separation of time between seeing a batter make contact with the ball and the sound of the crack of the bat.  This was not a new phenomenon, and I knew that light traveled faster than sound. The only problem was that I had no idea what that meant – it was just an expression.  As I sat there, I realized that the time between the sight and the sound was different depending on which field I was looking at.  The further the baseball diamond, the greater the separation in sound.

Suddenly I imagined myself on an endless field.  I put the action of the batter a certain distance away and in my mind recreated the scenario I was witnessing at the complex – filling in the rough data I had regarding distance and the perceived difference in time.  I then began pushing the batter further and further away – to extreme distances not possible in the park – and began to discover larger gaps in time between action and sound.

I had just explored what is often referred to as a “thought experiment”. A famous example being Sir Issaac Newton’s thought experiment in which he imagined a cannon placed on the highest mountain on Earth.  If it shot a cannon ball at a certain speed it would go such a distance and then fall.  Faster speed, further distance.  At what speed would it have to reach to never fall?  Our modern day satellites fly at that speed – Newton was a bit ahead of his time.

In my mind I stood there on the endless plain – with the player still moving further and further away – the time between visual and auditory contact growing further and further apart. Suddenly I began racing away in the opposite direction.  I was now speeding away from the batter just as he was departing from me.  At first both the visual and sound could reach me – but the duration between seeing the swing and hearing it just grew longer and longer.  But as I reached greater speeds I eventually surpassed the speed the sound was traveling at, yet not quite the speed of the visual.  Now here my mind had to consider a few options.  Would all sound cease… as certainly the crack of the bat hitting the ball would now never reach me.  Was it possible I would begin to hear the previous swing?

As I continued to speed up I began to wonder how much faster were the visuals than the sound?  Could I accelerate to the speed of the visual – and if so what would happen?  And if I went beyond? That was about all my mind could ponder at that point – but it kept in the back of my mind for years.

In college I would discover that I hadn’t been pondering these thoughts alone – that others had come before me – and some of the questions I had been asking were answered. It turns out sound travels at a rather leisurely 1,125 feet/second.  What I could only think of as the visuals was actually light – and light travels at an outrageous speed of approximately 983,000,000 feet/second.  So it turns out the light was going about 874,000 times faster than the sound.  No wonder I could notice the change in such a short passage of time at the park.

I learned in college that Albert Einstein had discovered in 1905 that the visuals – light – and the speed at which they approach us as the observer, is the only true constant.  That time was relative.  That one’s experience is relative – and that the duration of the time between two events can be different for two separate observers. Your experience is different from mine.

While this of course took a few weeks to fully settle in – what was even more astounding than Einstein’s theory of special relativity and all the consequences it lay forth – was that this amazing realization was less than 100 year old.  That for all of human history man had lived on this Earth, unaware of such an amazing truth.  That most people still walk around unaware of this amazing fact.

What we label as science, is in fact, the truth.  What is so terrifying about that statement is that we know so little.  The big secret is that we have no idea why we are here, or what is going on.  For most of human history we have made measurements and observations of the world around us – only to discover as time went on that those observations were biased because we are not the focal point – we are not the scientist looking through the telescope – we are not outside the Petri dish.  We are part of the experiment – no matter how much we’d rather play observer. And for all the thousands of years humans have walked on this planet – the millions of minds that have had the capacity to think – we’ve hardly scratched the surface. We have had to fill the void of knowledge with an endless array of stories and myths and faiths, because a believable lie provides more comfort than the fear of the unknown.

But the unknown is a curious thing.  There is room to ponder…  And while deep reflection on complex thoughts might hurt the brain at first, that’s just the warming up of brain cells yet untouched.  There are wonderous things to contemplate.

How small or large can things be? I say infinitely.  At one point it was Atoms – then we found Proton and Neutrons.  Then “whoops” there are some quarks inside of there.  Now scientists postulate a concept called “String Theory” that takes us even smaller.  Wouldn’t it make more sense that you could go infinitely small and infinitely large – or perhaps even better, it loops at some point. Think about it.

Everything Repeats. I would argue that one’s capacity to notice variety is directly related to one’s scale in relation to the object. So things on my scale – people, dogs, buildings, trees – I can tell the difference between them.  Looking at the tree from afar I might think all the leaves are the same.  Upon closer observation I would find they are all unique – but obviously the plant cells are the same.  Under the microscope… no.  If this is the case – and the plant cells replicate with variation, and humans replicate with variation – and clearly planets replicate with variation – at what point would this replication with variation stop?  Why would it suddenly stop?  Would it not make as much sense to have multiple universes with variation?  Or multiple microscopic elements smaller than a quark with variation? Attempts to find a solid state – a final solution provide no real answers.  So you bring me to the big bang…. big deal – I’ll just ask you what was going on shortly before it.

The fact is, we’ll never know everything – but we live in a time where we know far more than ever before – and the more minds focused on answering bigger questions – the better. Never forget this is actually occurring – and that we don’t know why. Religion is a simple way out, but what fun is that? Science isn’t the job of scientists – it’s the truth about the nature of reality – and every intelligent person should have an interest in that. Last year for my birthday I purchased a gyroscope after watching a lecture regarding some of their unique properties.  The questions that bizarre device has provided me have been endless – but so has the fun in discovery. While friends that stopped by probably thought I was crazy – some things are too interesting to just let the “scientists” play with them.

Don’t just memorize the facts – contemplate the unknowns. Wonder why things are they way they appear – find out if your observations are even correct in the first place. When was the last time you did some science? Life is more fun when you realize it’s happening.

Be curious.

On Christmas morning I saw a Facebook post from my cousin regarding a video game called Braid. As it is rare to see any female make a post about a fun video game – I decided to check it out.  The write-up seemed interesting and the graphics beautiful – so I dropped the $10 and purchased it for the Mac.  For the next few days I played an absolutely brilliant game – that was like many classic games I had played – but yet completely different then anything I had ever seen before.

The game focuses on time.  The main character, Tim, has the unique ability to control time, forward or backwards.  I first discovered this on the second level when I accidentally fell into a pit and died.  Rather than the typical fade-out, and starting the board again – I simply pressed the SHIFT key, time began to rewind, and I was back alive as if nothing had ever happened.

However – something had happened.  I had a memory of an incident occurring that no other creatures in the game did.  I now knew what was about to happen, and nobody else did.  What a spectacular power!  But the brilliance of Braid is that as the game unfolds – you begin to look at time entirely different – and both the positive and negative consequences of your actions.

The main storyline follows Tim’s quest to reclaim his princess who was taken away by an evil knight.  There are 6 chapters – each with it’s own unique take on time.  At the start of each chapter there are a series of books that provide insight not only into Tim, but also the characteristics of the world you are about to enter.  As the boards progress, your interaction with time become more and more profound and required.  Some solutions can only occur in reverse, or when time is manipulated entirely.  By the final boards, the natural pace of time is in reverse – and you must anticipate how things began in order to move forward.

However, this post is not a game review – this is a discussion on time.

As humans, we are 3-dimensional creatures witnessing glimpses of our 4th dimensional-self.¹ We experience time as a linear path completely out of our control.  Whereas we have full control over the dimensions beneath us (I can walk forward/backwards, left/right, can go up and down) and have almost no observations of the dimensions above us (a topic for another blog post) – we remain trapped in the 3rd, aware of time (4th), but unable to move back and forth within it.

However – human beings have this amazing gift of being able to predict and conjure up scenarios in our brains.  No other species known to man can project plausible outcomes the way humans can.  Nor does any creature have the ability to reflect on the past and re-associate past experiences the way humans can.  You will never meet a dog with long-held regrets, or a fish with long-term goals. Our species alone has the capacity to explore beyond the moment. One has to begin to wonder – is it possible we have some mild control over this 4th dimension?  That time is not the master.  Or rather, that our minds can see the fringes of the 5th dimension where all those possible realities exist?

Regardless of your views on Quantum Physics, it is quite easy to see that one’s actions have consequences, positive or negative.  Two years ago, before I was getting ready to move to Spain for two months, I decided to sell my car.  The money would be helpful for the trip I felt, but more importantly, I began to believe it would have positive consequences for me in the future.  Sure enough – upon my return to the States, I began walking to work every day.  More amazing moments and coincidences have occurred during these walks to and from work then I could have ever experienced before.  I’ve discovered a grocery store I never would have stopped in while driving, that has changed my diet and the foods I cook.  Then there are the realities that never occurred that I might be unaware of.  Car accidents on the negative, perhaps unexplored road-trips on the positive.  Regardless, the trajectory of life was changed drastically, as it almost always is by our decisions and many of the positive elements that have occurred I was able to foresee before I sold the car. That realization that I can make sweeping changes for the future with simple actions in the present has become a major force in my life.

It is safe to infer then, that actions in the present will create new realities in the future.  Unfortunately though – the implication here is that everything that is occurring in your current moment, is the direct result of your past actions.  Most would prefer to think otherwise – that the moment is the moment – and the past is memories, the future unforeseen.  This is where I disagree entirely.  The future is quite foreseeable, the past quite easy to manipulate – and the current moment is nothing but an opportunity to explore time and create reality.

So how do you begin to control time?  First off, as almost every guru/preacher/life-coach/grandmother will tell you, you need plans.  You need to know what it is you want to do – how you want to live – where you want to be – with whom you want to be with – and all the other details of the life you desire.  There are plenty of other blog posts that can explain the importance of knowing yourself at the core, and the pitfalls of the unexamined life – hopefully you have already begun this process. If not, turn off Mad Men and begin exploring.

With a plan in mind – the next step is to truly envision that life.  Not in the abstract – not just the feeling – or some photos from a magazine – it needs to be as clear as the memories in your past.  You need to be able to call on it at any point, explore it, and connect it to other memories. Don’t just focus on the goal of that memory – look around.  Seriously, turn around and see what is on the wall behind you in this fantasy.  If you’re envisioning a person, what types of socks are they wearing?  Force your mind (especially if you’ve let it sleep most your life) to begin working its magic.  All the details are there.  Put down the iPhone – the greatest piece of technology you own is your mind.

Do you have it?  Can you feel it?  Your brain is touching the 5th dimension – and you are now moving within the 4th.  Here comes the tricky part – working your way backwards through time.  With a clear vision in mind, press the SHIFT key and rewind your life from this future point back to your present.  Go as slowly or fast as you need to, and as often as you need to.  Just make sure your mind is doing the work and the details are showing up.  Your mind will produce the details – and more of them the more often you review these future memories.  Take note of the actions, and patterns that exist in these conjured scenarios. You will have a less challenging time jumping the pits and dodging the fireballs of life when you know they are coming, and how you defeated them.

If there are conflicts prior to your current moment in the 4th dimension, do not be hesitant to go back in time and fix those issues.  While you will fully remember that they occurred, if you go back and fix them, you will find the rest of the world for the most part forgets that they ever occurred (okay, this is more like the game, but in reality nobody really cares that much about anything other than themselves, so if you truly do make amends for past issues, or just face up to problems that have been plaguing you – rather than just ignoring the past – you do change the current moment).

Most importantly – remember that life is occurring… always.  That just like in the game, we don’t know why we’re moving forward in the 4th – or where we are headed in the end – but if we are smart, clever and persistent with our efforts, we will have a wonderful experience.

“Know yourself; And urge yourself ceaselessly.”

SOURCES:

1. Imagining the Tenth Dimension
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA

These are things the elderly woman sitting beside me on my 3.5 hour flight from Houston (a stop-over on my flight from Philadelphia) told me. I won’t bother to detail which points I agree with or disagree with. The point of this exercise is that we are all bat-shit crazy, and should probably just learn to smile more and listen for the sake of the story.

• She was born in Chicago, but moved to Missouri
• She was 1 of 11 children.
• She acquired the job of head editor for her high school newspaper because the girl who had received the position originally was lazy. When a famous riverboat performer came to do an assembly at the school and refused to give interviews because of limitations on her time, she had offered to help the woman pack up her stuff, and in the process recorded short notes. When the performer noticed this, she suggested that because the packing had gone so smooth, she now had time for an interview. With story in hand, she took the position right out from under that other lazy gal.
• She has 3 children. One lives in Portland, one lives in Honduras working as a missionary and the other lives in California.
• There are various types of fish oil vitamins on the market, but only one in the US that uses purely Salmon.
• Her favorite bible passage is Matthew 21:22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.
• While she and her husband and two of the kids were stationed in West Germany in the 50s, they took a two week camping trip through 9 countries. They purchased a German VW which they eventually had shipped back to the states when they attempted to homestead in Alaska.
• Cell phone towers only exist in the US. Everywhere else people just use their cell phones and there are no towers. She knows it sounds a bit crazy, but she believes the towers are probably used to track us using those very cell phones.
• She sold the German VW several years later for $500. A local car salesman had offered her only $150, but she felt she could sell as good as him and proved that. She was offered $250… she was offered $400… but she held out till the morning and sure enough got what she wanted.
• When she and one of her sons went to attend her daughter’s wedding in Honduras she had him stay with this older couple and a young man. Unbeknown to her, the young man had a sister, who on the second day stopped by, and though she spoke no English, and apparently he no Spanish, by year’s end and after three trips down, they were engaged.
• She hiked the base of the grand canyon in two days. It was her 3rd attempt. The first time, her group was too large with 28 individuals, so she offered to stay behind. The second time, her knee began to hurt right before the hike, and had to pull-out. The third time was with her brother. He had done it before alone in a single day. She says if she had done it alone, she would still be there.
• As a child, she wrote to the head of the local dentistry school at the haste of her mother, and he was so moved by the letter he allowed her to get braces at the school at no cost, even though she needed stage 3 braces, which the school wasn’t totally qualified for. She couldn’t stand the delay, so when not in the presence of authority figures, she would tie as many as 8 rubber-bands on each of the braces. When the braces came off, the doctor told her to put on some lipstick. “No, more he said. A girl is told she has a nice smile, she starts thinking about her hair – she cares about her hair, suddenly she starts dressing nice. Boys start to pay attention. She went from being on the 5th rung (1st Rung: Popular kids, 2nd Rung: Athletic Kids, 3rd Rung: Kids with money, 4th Rung: Nerds and Bookwords, 5th Rung: Nobodies) to the 1st rung – a real popular girl.
• 98% of women who have abortions are later diagnosed with breast cancer
• Sales runs in the family apparently, because when she posted her truck for sale (now living south of Eugene Oregon) a farmer from outside Portland drove all the way down after talking to her son on the phone, unaware that the voice on the other end was that of a 11 year old. He had to wait around till she got home from work to close the deal.
• People with Vitamin B deficiencies have a long canal running down the middle of their tongue. Upon closer inspection, my tongue suggests I am VERY deficient in Vitamin B and while she’s not saying this about me in particular… people like me are often short-tempered, easily irritated, and while they might be super nice to an old lady they don’t know, such as herself, we can be super cruel to our own mothers and the people who love us. It’s easy to pretend to like a stranger, but when we, the vitamin B deficient, know someone loves us, we can afford to be quick with them and often quite mean, because we know they won’t abandon us.
• By the very fact that President Obama can not produce a birth certificate, he must be a foreigner and untrustworthy.
• She hadn’t been raised religious, that was more her husband’s thing. But he had been attending a church and they asked if they could come over after dinner a few times a week to chat with her about God and her faith. They explained that they wanted her to sign this card to pledge her devotion to God. She said she would probably never do that, but agreed to listen to them, and invited them into her house. The first evening, they chatted a bit about life and family and work, but they spoke a good deal about God. When the meeting concluded, they asked her what she had though – and she said she wished they’d done 80% real issues and 20% faith discussions, and not the other way around. But she agreed to meet again. They did this for three weeks, when she suddenly woke in the middle of the night and knew she had to sign that card. She didn’t know why – she just felt compelled by God to do so.
• In response to an article that downplayed the use of vitamins in curing certain kidney ailments, she wrote an editorial that was read by a deacon in her Church, who apparently was associated with a vitamin company and asked her to become a rep, a job she has till this day.
• Many of our health issues comes from aluminum something both the industry and the government has been suppressing for almost a century now.
• She sold encyclopedias for a brief time, but never had much luck. The crutch of the sales pitch was showing how important it was for children to be able to get information when they are inspired in the moment – a service your local library just can’t provide. She never had a sale, although her husband did sell one set to a co-worker for her, but she doesn’t feel that counts.
• On the prior flight from Honduras to Houston, the gentlemen beside her was an intern for a senator, who had sent him there to monitor the elections. Apparently he was not associated with ACORN.
• She was married to her husband for 27 years, then one day he said he just couldn’t stand to be tied down any more and asked for a divorce. Several years later he came back and admitted he had been foolish and asked her to take him back. She said if he could be faithful and a good husband for a year, she would agree to marry him again. He stayed for five months and then left again. She gets asked out for coffee from time to time by gentlemen, and that’s all well and good. But coffee leads to dinner, and multiple dinners lead to the bedroom, and she has no intention of going there. Sure, she can keep a conversation with a guy like myself, but I’m her youngest son’s age, so the pressure isn’t there (and I shouldn’t be offended by that). If it’s God’s plan for her husband to come back, she doesn’t want to be tied down to someone else when it happens.

Last week I decided it was time to make an appointment with the eye-doctor and freshen up the old prescription.  It had been about two years and I had a suspicion my sight wasn’t as strong as it had been. Losing your sight, as I have been for over a decade now, is sort of a bizarre experience.  It’s not like spraining an ankle or catching a cold. It is a far slower and more gradual awareness that overcomes you.  One day you notice you can’t read a street sign, but have a sinking suspicion that at one time you could have. When you get your new glasses it’s like being in some sort of fantastic hyper-realistic dream – everything is so sharp and you notice items in the distance you never knew you could see.

This time however I wasn’t going to get a new pair of glasses – I had decided to make the switch to contacts.

My reasons were two-fold:

First, having given up my car over a year ago – I now walk or bike just about everywhere.  With the winter months approaching, I was not looking forward to another mist-filled season of walking to work blind.  While the rain isn’t enough to really get me wet, it does cover my glasses pretty instantly, and I’m forced to either keep wiping them free of drops, or abandoning them altogether and just walking in a blurry haze into downtown.

Second, I was tired of choosing which accessory to wear every day.  If I had some budget to throw-around, perhaps I could purchase a dozen pairs of glasses and enjoy some creativity in my presentation.  But I only have two pairs – my slightly broken but highly functional metal pair, and my Portland-hipster thick framed ones.  While I certainly enjoy both – wearing one or the other every day was as unbearable as having to wear a uniform to work would be.

So why hadn’t I made the switch years ago?  Simple… I’m a human being.  And as such I had filled my mind with a whole handful of insurmountable fears and reservations.  For example:

- My eyes are sensitive, and thus I wouldn’t want a piece of plastic jammed into them.
- It would be too much of a pain putting them in and taking them out each day.
- I’m going to get laser eyes surgery SOMEDAY, so why do anything TODAY?

The typical collection of excuses and misconceptions that lead to inaction.

My sister Jillian helped calm my first major fear: that I suffered from ultra-sensitive eyes and my precious peepers couldn’t possibly handle this thick piece of plastic shoved inside of them.  Her response was, “What are you, an idiot?  Who do you think likes having pieces of plastic shoved in their eyes?” I suddenly realized that I had no idea what a contact lens actually was.  I had never touched or really seen one up close.  At Lenscrafters I discovered what they are actually like and realized my fears had been completely incorrect and based on false concepts – these weren’t “lenses”, they were more like a thin film.  Not only that – once in, they were completely unnoticeable in my eyes.  In fact, I realized that it’s not contact lenses that are uncomfortable – it’s a giant lens contraption hooked to your ears and strapped across your face that is the uncomfortable solution. Contacts aren’t MORE uncomfortable than glasses, they are far LESS.

The second fear that it would be too difficult and thus a pain to take them in and out is already proving to be false.  Taking them out is a snap and just an added minute to my typical night-time routine.  Getting them in is still a bit of a trick, but each day I get better and this morning was rather easy.  It’s fascinating how the mind learns new activities. If you just trust your mind to it and don’t try to force your own solutions, the body quickly learns how to do what you want.

The final reason – that there is a better solution that I will eventually use, so no sense in taking this first step – is a major problem that I’ve been trying to work on recently.  While it is always important to keep a focus on where you want to get to and the life you wish to lead, day-dreaming is no substitute for improving your current state.  In the words of Bob Dylan, “When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?” It’s a bit selfish to be living in this modern time, with all the gifts I’ve been afforded – the sort of life almost no human being on earth could have dreamed of a mere century ago – but to say “This isn’t enough yet for me to be happy or to enjoy this gift. Sure I have a nice apartment, but I want a house.  Sure I have my own business, but I want a full company. The things I have are nice, but I want better.“  Seriously? So because there is something better out there, I can just ignore the current situation, or worse, look down upon it?  That is a rather foolish philosophy, but it serves its purpose, albeit a negative one. By placing the bar too high, we can easily ignore all the smaller steps we could be taking to improve our situation.

I’ve recently tried to take each of these major tasks or life goals and create smaller steps or solutions that I can begin tackling immediately.  Fixing my sight, which eventually will lead to laser eye surgery suddenly had some smaller steps.  Some included researching the laser procedure and pricing, which I have started.   But the other steps revolved around improving my sight in its current state with an eye exam and to explore contacts as a middle-ground.  That exploration took very little time, and now I get to see things massively better than I did before and I’m further down the road when I eventually have the money (or health insurance) to tackle the major goal of fixed sight.

So beyond the fact that I can see remarkably better than I could before, and I’m no longer forced to wear the same accessory each day like some sort of cartoon character – I have also learned an important lesson about moving forward in life and business.  When faced with a perceived obstacle, make sure your fears are grounded in reality, research and find out the facts, and remember that small steps take you a lot further than doing nothing at all.