Day 4,064

Growth:

Leaving the office to eat a quiet lunch in my car while parked in the woods. After lunch I set and alarm for myself and took a 15 minute nap. Talk about feeling much more relaxed and rejuevnated when I got back to work.

So often I run from one thing to another and see my lunch as an opportunity to get something else done. What if the thing that needs to actually get done is taking a pause, relaxing my brain, and letting everything from the morning settle? Do this more often, allow it to be space without need of being productive or feeling compelled to action. Create space.

Appreciation:

A few nights ago Becky and I watched the movie Arrival (here’s the preview: https://youtu.be/tFMo3UJ4B4g?si=4_kXYUhy1NT1c9Qi). Last night I finished reading the short story it was based on, Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. While I enjoyed the movie more from an emotional standpoint, the story pretty much helped to break my brain.

The story dives into several fascinating concepts, but the biggest mental leap for me was its exploration of free will versus determinism. I’ve always been firmly entrenched in the free will camp, but I have to admit there have been many times when I’ve done something simply because it felt so right in the core of my being. Was that a pull towards an already completed future that I was unable to see? Who knows? That’s part of what makes this such an intriguing rabbit hole to explore.

As I thought about the story, I began to see an interesting possibility: Free will is how we experience our choices from within time, while fate is how those same choices look when viewed from outside time.

In the moment, we experience ourselves making choices. But what if we could look back on our future the same way we look back on our memories? Would those choices suddenly appear inevitable? And if they did, would that make them any less our own? Wouldn’t they be the choices we’d already made? The Choices we’ve always made?

It brought back so many thoughts and memories of the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. In it, the alien Tralfamadorians perceive all of time simultaneously, rather than one moment after another. We seem to always think of time as a linear progression, forever moving forward. But what if we’ve been looking at it incorrectly? What if time is actually an ongoing whole, with every moment already existing, even though we’re only capable of experiencing one at a time?

Vonnegut illustrates this through a Tralfamadorian guide who asks his audience to imagine a person whose head is encased in a steel sphere with a six-foot pipe welded to the single eyehole. The person is strapped to a moving flatcar, unable to turn their head or see the larger landscape around them. All they can perceive is a tiny, distant dot of reality at a time. Whatever happens to pass through that narrow field of vision becomes their entire experience of existence. As Vonnegut puts it, “That’s life.”

I’d highly recommend this short story to anyone who wants to stretch their brains a bit, largely in uncomfortable ways. The more I’ve wrestled with it the more I’ve found clarity and increased blurriness all at the same time.

So it goes.

Presence:

Our morning run, always one of the best parts of my mornings with Becky a few times each week. So often we talk and catch up, this morning saw periods of quiet as we were both in our own heads as we ran. For me this led to a handful of ideas for work that could end up making a profound impact on our business in the next year.

Regardless of the conversation – heavy or light – having that time in the morning to be up and about while the world sleeps offers up so many moments of presence and space. Sharing it with Becky makes it all the better!

Thanks!!!