I have a deep and abiding fascination with time (as I guess most of us temporally-ensnared humans do – what would the plastic surgery industry be without feeding such obsession) ..(or in fact the Getting Things Done cult.ure of time management..wish I could say I was an acolyte, but I’m yet to crack the nod of the gods who dole out effortless efficiency).

No doubt each choose our own experience of time.. which accounts for the fact that at different points time flies, crawls, or horror!! those who go on an active cull and kill time! there are even cultures who have reversed their concept of past and future. Stubbornly proving lifetime after lifetime that linear time has a good firm footing in our cultural and not merely biological encoding

One of my favourite sites for those not afraid of the big questions at the frontier is The Insitute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (serious mouthful, but soooo worth it, if you have the time… check this article on hacking time). With all this progressive complexity and accelerating change to wrap our heads around %-/ sometimes it’s best to keep it simple, the way Einstein explained it in his famous analogy of this wacky elastic experience of stretchybendy time we all get to feel:

“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”

Seizing the day and living it heartily till you’ve shaken it loose of all its treasures, seems a brilliant philosophy in theory. In practice: consistently staying in the calm zen present moment contradicts the entropy-fodder of our human form. No matter how enlightened we become; us humans all eventually scoot one-by-one off the spinning ball, our bodies shovelled or sprinkled back into its surface. We have but one life (in this particular configuration anyway) but as either wild woman Mae West or Joe Lewis once said

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough”

If we could constantly shed the past and have no concern for the future, I believe we would have no need for emotion, good or bad, it would become a redundant very quickly. But I doubt if any evolutionary programming could survive it either. Without the pain-pleasure drivers of past success or failure to guide our decisions, could we progress? – unquestionably a whole lot of NLP practitioners would be out of work!

Uber-scientists like Einstein, Hawking and Feynman have offered us mind-pretzelling paradoxes for the world our senses perceive/deceive .. but offer no practical way out of the spacetime conundrum. Deepak Chopra writes with such measured, graceful and wholly beguiling integrated logic about quantum healing, the delusions of reality or reversing ageing.. but is this bright paragon getting younger (or am I just missing the boat here?) Not because I have any deep desire yet to do such a thing myself, so far forward rocks >> but just for the curious challenge, just to see if we can!!

Please step up if you have dodged the arrow of time or can really reverse wrinkles carved into our cheeks from laughter or living under the African sun (no humanfabric tailors please) I mean through some honest to goodness brainhacking. Empirical proof, no bloody half-assed hippie hypotheses, in the flesh if you will.