the modern Prometheus

Last night, I was having trouble falling asleep. The ticking from my clocks was bothering me. This is unusual. I have five clocks in my room that make noise in the traditional tick-tock way, and normally they form a very nice background rhythm with slightly varying pitches for texture. However, last night, the ticking drove me insane. It wasn't until I put in my headphones that I was finally able to drift off.

The passage of time has always fascinated me. For a short period of time (ha, punny) several years ago, I attempted to convince myself that time, in the fundamental sense, does not exist. All I managed to do was determine that time, as we see it on a day-to-day basis, is largely a human construction. The hour, the day, the year--though they are firmly rooted in astronomy and facts of life, they have been somewhat abitrarily picked. Who decided an hour was 3600 ticks of a clock? (Julius Caesar, at least in the calendar we use today, but that's beside the point.) Why not 7200?

In the grand scheme of things, though, what we call the thing doesn't change the nature of the thing itself except perhaps in terms of connotation. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, and similarly, were an hour to be 7200 seconds long, a 4-hour workday would still feel like 8 3600-second hours. It's the same period of time. It's just defined differently. This is, of course, common sense, but it fascinates me.

Still, regardless of how we define it, time is a very real thing. I cannot go back in time a week and change one thing that has made my life a bit more difficult. From this, I have derived my principle of no regrets. In a universe where, at least from the human perspective, time is linear, I don't see how there can be another option. I see little point in dwelling on something I have no hope in changing. Instead, I should take what I can from the experience: highs, lows, follies, and apply what I have learned to the future--the one thing I do have control over.

The future is a somewhat scary concept largely because, while I have control over much of my role in it, much of it is still uncertain. Humans have traditionally feared uncertainty; it's what makes us so afraid of things like the dark in which we can't see what's around us or dying because we can never be certain of what comes after. However, I think there is a genuine need to embrace uncertainty. If physicists can do it and thereby completely change the way the quantum world is viewed, then I can change my perception on a macrocosmic scale.

If we never open our closet for fear of the monsters inside, how do we know they're really monsters?

An hour may not be an hour. A monster may not be so scary in person.

"MY REIGN IS NOT YET OVER." -Frankenstein's monster