Tag: Space

  • A space-time freedom continuum

    Spoiler 1: This has nothing to do with science! Signs, maybe.

    Spoiler 2: This has a lot of quotes. What can I say, smart people have already framed things so well. 

    I got an interesting response to Change Signalling – Sriks7 asked me what are the values based metrics you are thinking of for yourself? He also mentioned that in his case, they are seen to boil down to where to spend your attention and time. I can relate to that. In the words of Dylan, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.” I have noticed that my overall sense of well-being goes up when I allow myself unstructured time. I watch random things, torture D and twitter with bad wordplay, listen to music, and sometimes just watch clouds float. The last one is slightly more dynamic than paint drying. 🙂

    But my answer would have at least one more layer.  Though time is definitely a key element here, I think of it being part of a broader umbrella – freedom. My working definition of freedom is related to one of my favourite quotes “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl. Freedom, to me, is that space – to be able to choose a response that I can live with, always. Or, to paraphrase a bunch of Jean-Paul Sartre’s quotes, freedom is nothing but the existence of our will.

    As I wrote earlier, one approach that I have used is to reduce the stimuli. But increasingly, I find that there’s a limit to that.”The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.” ~J.R.R.Tolkien. My introspection therefore, has been in the direction of the response. I have found that my power to choose a response depends on how secure I feel. I further explored this “security” and realised that it boiled down to money. It seems like when I can afford it, and that’s almost literal, I am nice to those around me. When I feel that our financial independence plan is threatened, I tend to react badly. It doesn’t help that I am blessed with a scarcity mindset.

    My belief is that by the time we are ready to activate the plan, I would have an abundance mindset. That is based on the changes I have seen in myself in the last few years. But I am also reasonably sure, from experience, that though there are these small wins that happen organically on the way, a mindset switch requires effort. A couple of challenges are immediately visible. One, since I do have a few more years of a full-time professional life left, there are trade-offs on a daily basis, and they require a balancing act between knowing who I am and being who I need to be. The challenge is being rooted on the first while executing the second. Two, while the ego might have been reasonably tamed, there is self image which has its own demands. In this dual tussle, there are choices and actions that might derail me.

    When, between changing circumstances and myself, I have learned to increase that space (in my earlier definition) I’d have achieved the freedom I desire. I do wonder about Loki’s (surprisingly) deep thought though – “Freedom is life’s great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart, you will know peace.”

  • Game Theory

    There’s this favourite t-shirt of mine – “If you’re interested in time travel, meet me last thursday”. I’ve always been interested in dimensions, thanks to science fiction and Skeletor/Sorceress in the He-Man series opening portals in other dimensions outside the physical constraints of Eternia. That perhaps explains the recurrence of alternate realities  and parallel universes in the blog.

    S and I had this interesting discussion recently on dimensions. No, don’t run away, it wasn’t really a scientific discussion.  I definitely am not qualified for one anyway, though at a concept level, I think it did get close to M-theory. (no relation to this blog 🙂 )  It was based on an abstract thought that on one hand, time is getting crunched and so is space, so where is all the crunched ‘stuff’ going. My point of view was that, time was expanding not crunching, since technology has made it easier for me to do things in shorter time, so it would perhaps balance the space crunch. No, conference calls don’t count, that works the other way. Space is no longer crunched, because calls are taken on the mobile, so conference halls are not required, and sigh, the calls last forever. 😐

    The thought I had though, was that the relationship (space-time) was being defined in/by the reality around us. What if there were other dimensions involved which were affecting this relationship? Do they exist? Will we unlock them? Will they be the answers to the occurrences that we cannot explain within our current dimensional knowledge? Funnily, these questions pop up whenever I play with the shiny new toy called Foursquare, and see people unlocking badges.

    At a basic level, badges get unlocked after specific user experiences – some repetitions, some new ones. I always equate them to new dimensions we observe in our personality after different experiences. That’s a kind of unlocking too, no? All of that brings me to another unanswered question. Is what we call death is actually the ‘experience’ we need to have to unlock another dimension? Or maybe we’ll need the other dimensions only after the death experience? Just like a regular multi level game. 🙂

    until next time, death is a great leveler? 🙂

    PS. What if the experience we understand as ‘death’ is ‘living’ in another dimension? I wonder then if cremation hurts, but our expressions in the other dimension cannot be heard here. Brr..

  • My corner in space.. and time…

    …and it was another Sunday when i lazed around, watched some TV, saw a movie on DVD, blogged, micro blogged, and read. In this case, i finished reading ‘Space’ by James Michener. In case you aren’t familiar with his works, he writes huge sagas, and in this case, he uses human characters and their lives to bring out a tangibility to what was in my mind an abstract – Space. (used in the context of the cosmos)

    I really didn’t do anything world changing, and as most weekends go, this could be classified as a wasted weekend. Of course Calvin would object. To use one of my fave quotes “Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless” or that wonderful “A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend”. Anyway, it led me extrapolate that to the life being lived, especially because these days, i’m coming across a lot of literature built around setting goals, giving a meaning to life, and so on.

    I think we all fight our battles with the universe, and most usually end up choosing comfortable corners from where we proceed to watch the stories unfold. The size of the corners is one of the things that vary with each of us, another is the extent of our activity in these corners. The rest of the world is a blur. Take the things that you are interested in, put them in this corner, and you should get the blurriness of the world I’m talking about. What makes these corners sometimes uncomfortable is our comparison with others’ corners and our perceptions of its comfort. Also our comfort needs vary over time.

    In our corners, what we do is of consequence to a limited number of people. This number is perhaps, the measure by which we end up conferring tokens of greatness on people. A few words in ‘Space’ caught my attention

    ..you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted.

    And that sums up the paradox quite well. What I do is meaningful in the finite time I live in, and is futile in the infinity that I exist in. And as i try to make sense of that paradox, I am also reminded of Floyd’s ‘Time‘. I’d admit that I am frittering my life away, if only I knew what the starting gun was for.

    until next time, keep running… 😐

  • Space

    James A Michener

    ..the final frontier. To me, space has been an abstract, with a few perspectives molded by the science fiction I read. with this work, albeit a novel, James Michener gave me a lot of tangible snippets of how humans working in this wonderful scientific field have evolved over time.
    From the time of the Second World War, when creating rockets that would destroy opposing forces and cities was the priority to a nation’s obsession to place a man on the moon, during the Cold War, to NASA and later scientists who grapple with manned and unmanned explorations and the possibility of life outside earth, this book, as with all of Michener’s works, is one vast canvas.
    And mirroring, and perhaps concluding a debate in the book, (man as a measure of success..and interest) Michener uses the lives of the politicians, astronauts and the scientists working on the missions to show the universal nature of man’s self doubts, his trials, tribulations, joys, sorrows, successes and failures. Personal battles – with self and others, mingle with professional clashes to make the story..human. A few real life figures like Sagan and Asimov get a mention in this work of fiction.There are some wonderful hat tips to some excellent works in sci fi.
    In tackling Space, Michener also draws attention to other profound things – evolution, religion, culture and gives some amazing perspectives on questions that each of us carry within us. A wonderful read, that re-created the awe and splendour that the cosmos invokes, and reminded me of the fundamental paradox of human existence – the preciousness in finite time and the meaninglessness, in the infinite.

  • Lost Universes

    Sometime back, I got an email forward – A Violinist in the Metro, about the world famous musician Joshua Bell, who, in 45 minutes, played 6 Bach pieces, with a violin worth $3.5 million, at a metro station in Washington, and collected $32 for the effort. A couple of days back, he had sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats had averaged $100. The incident was a social experiment by Washington Post to check out whether we perceive beauty in a commonplace environment and whether we stop to appreciate it. The findings are a testament of the fast paced life we live, and the things we miss out on.

    But a few other facts in this incident interested me. For one, the crowd segment that paid the most attention to the musician were children. Their parents had to forcibly tug them away. Even if we are cynical and claim that its just curiosity, and not an appreciation of music, I still wonder about our life graph, and the part where we lose our innate curiosity. And its not just curiosity, its innocence, its a lot of other things that we lose on the way.

    When I meet friends from school or college, I sense they’ve changed, and so have I. Attitudes,mindsets, behaviour, all transforming themselves according to the experiences that life throws at us. And because of this, I am not able to relate to them the way I used to at an earlier point in time. A part of me that is perhaps lost forever. Even if I tried to re create it, it would be resisted by the current me.

    The other portion in the incident that interested me was that after the performance, there was no applause or recognition. People just moved on, oblivious to the phenomenon they didn’t perceive. I wonder if Joshua Bell was disappointed. Perhaps, if you’re a musician of that caliber, you would have passed the stage where you needed a stamp of approval. Or is he just like me? An unconfident performer of life, who looks around apologetically if he has upset any balance. Perhaps if i could perform like a carefree child, I could get back the curiosity and the other things that I’ve lost.

    This stream of consciousness reminded me of something I’d read about in the novel Space – a space shuttle’s flight. As it ascends into space, at different levels it discards different parts, parts that were useful to get it to that point, but useless after they’ve served this utility. And after completing the mission that it was sent for, it blazes a path back through the atmosphere, burning all except its core. It lands in a place far away from the place of its origin, and time has passed while all this is happening. In a strange way, it reminded me of the way lives are lived – at massive speeds, too fast to notice the beauty of the vast expanses of space around, to achieve something which is relevant only in a very small context, burning up with the hope that all that is being done is worthwhile, and perhaps in a lost, melancholic way, deciding that since anyway the life is to be lived, might as well live it with a mission, however inadequate it seems.

    until next time, touchdown