Fugitive Time

I was amazed to find that I still have, on my hard drive, a document full of posts I made in an old blog from about ten or twelve years ago. I'm glad I saved that stuff--I imagine I deleted the blog but didn't want to lose what I had written--but I confess there's a little of the Flowers for Algernon plot twist going on. I almost didn't recognize the writing. I only vaguely remembered writing each of the posts, but not at all the inspiration for some of the humor in them. I was quite good!  This stuff was all written during the last good, productive years of my career, before the downward spiraling tail end, and, I read, I was starting to think about retiring, without a definite plan yet, but thinking it might be a good idea. Sometimes relishing an idea is better than the actual execution of it.

Now, if I may beat an idiomatic expression just a little deeper into the ground, fast forward to 2017. Here I am, totally without plan or direction, even eight years into my retirement. By the way, eight years??  It seems so much longer than that. Is that a good thing? Time flies when you're having fun, but at least the good news is that I am ageing faster and faster.  The bad news is, that's not good news.

So.  The passage of time.  It's problematic.  Not in the way climbing a mountain might be problematic, but in the way you fall off a log. You never forget how to pass the time. It's like riding a bicycle, or falling off a log.

I keep writing and writing, in this post, but I can't seem to climb out of this hole. What I'm getting at, I think, is that we are good at thinking about stuff that helps us survive. Our brains do some things really well without us ever having to try try very hard. Like recognizing faces, even though as we've all been told a zillion times it is such a data-dense operation that even supercomputers have a difficult time of it, or like remembering where objects are,  We are so good at that that we invented a memory trick method where we pretend to place facts in a make-believe room in our minds.

But we are really bad at solving more than one problem at a time, or rather, figuring out a problem whose cause is more than one thing.  That really throws us for a loop. Apparently in the evolutionary development of the hominid brain, that situation just didn't come up that often to require a special adaptation to get around it. Don't believe me?  Look at this picture of my mirror, where you can see the mirror image of my watch in it. What time is it?

What does it all mean?  Who knows.  I'm just saying. And, in reality, deciphering the time here is actually the easiest when you figure out the single thing you need to think of when looking at it, rather than the two obvious things that are wrong. How is this like life?  Gawd, I hope not at all.