Thoughts & life experiences of a Chicago area graphic artist

19 January 2018

No Time? Know Time.

Sun and Moon Symbols to represent how Those
Two Heavenly Bodies help us keep Time. 
Illustration © O. Douglas Jennings

Time is an element of our lives that can be exasperating as well as mysterious. To live is to have time. To run out of time can seem like coming up against a harsh barrier.

But it helps to reframe one's awareness of time. To Know Time is to bring one's consciousness into the NOW; to be more mindful of the given moment.

Shifting your awareness of time can become a game. Speed it up. Slow it down. See time as kind of like a book in which you can flip through the pages at your leisure. Each breath is a moment in time and a gateway to renew oneself.

I've found that to have awareness of your moment, your consciousness, your space and to be grateful of whatever ability and strength you have to enjoy any single bit of your present experience: That helps you know time and extend it.

To live is to have time. Miss a deadline? You're not really dead are you? Whatever was lost, you still have time as long as you can breathe.

Book Recommendation: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Illustration © O. Douglas Jennings. All rights reserved.


Another review/commentary on Rovelli's theories of time:

Time Travel? You’re Asking The Wrong Question Says Quantum Scientist Carlo Rovelli in his book The Order of Time.

“There is a perspectival aspect to the order of time.”

“The best physicists of the past were all nourished by philosophy: Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, Newton… A full understanding of why time looks to us the way it does will not be a result that physicists reach alone.”

Rovelli puts forth an intriguing theory that time is an emergent construct that has no true, primary existence out side of the human mind. 

It comes about from the requisite human processes of adapting to and understanding our environment over the thousands of years of our evolution as a species (Our survival depending upon the ability to predict future outcomes based on past stimuli).

“Time is ignorance” relates Rovelli. He categorizes it is a kind of “blurring” effect that we humans perceive in our attempt to make sense of the experience of entropy in our part of the universe.

I guess it is like (I imagine) an example of what the Apostle Paul wrote as recorded in the New Testament, “For now we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Related post:
Mindful Spacetime

AND -- One of my favorite songs about time:


Check out this comic on time:




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