How to Master Time
It has nothing to do with productivity
Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli repeatedly assures us that time does not exist throughout his beautifully crafted books. He explains that what we experience as time is actually entropy. We are witnessing the movement from order to disorder. Your sensation of the passage of time is your brain making sense of your gradual decay into disorder. Some people find this idea disturbing.
I find it liberating.
Metaphysically speaking, whether time exists or not is irrelevant to our everyday life because we are finite beings. There will come a point when we will cease to exist in the same form as we are now. What happens after that point is the great mystery.
Because time is not real, it cannot be saved. It also cannot be wasted. All we can do with the time before we succumb to entropy is to be. The secret to solving the problem of time is to be ever-present.
Nostalgia is to live in a past that didn’t exist, and anxiety is to live in a future that will not exist. Being present is to exist.
With our wonderful, powerful minds, we often futilely attempt to defy the laws of the universe by traveling back and forth through time. Nostalgia and anxiety are our feeble attempts at time travel.
We can free ourselves from the tyranny of time, because it exists only in our minds. However, we cannot escape the inevitability of entropy.
You are going to die. And so am I.
Being present is often the most difficult thing we can do. It also happens to be the most important if you are interested in making the most of your finite life.
What are we to do with our lives? The clock is ticking, isn’t it? That’s the great paradox. Even if we accept that time is a construct of our feeble mortal minds, it still influences how we understand the world.
