time – Go Retire Psychiatrist

I’ve been bugged by a quote bouncing around in my head for the last few days: “The second hand always moves forward.”

I think a head coach for a college basketball team said that several times in the heat of the last period of a game (maybe March Madness, I don’t know) about 8 or so years ago. I’m not sure why I’m preoccupied by this lately. I googled the statement “The second hand always moves forward” and could only find stories which tended to contradict it, at least when it comes to actual clocks.

Sometimes second hands don’t always move forward. Sometimes they get stuck or even tick backward. I’ve never heard of that.

That led to thoughts about my own experience of time and how it has changed over the last several months since I retired. I often sense time moving faster forward than I’d like. I guess that makes some sense because I’m not getting any younger. I think of a TV commercial which uses a song sung in French. I finally looked it up on the internet and it turns out the tune was originally done by Edith Piaf. In English, the title of the song is “No Regrets.”

I have some regrets and I marvel at anyone who doesn’t. But I never get a sense of time moving backward.

Anyhow, this led to wondering about time itself, specifically about time travel, which makes sense in the context of regrets. I don’t wallow in regret but like anybody I occasionally wonder what it would be like if I could time travel back into the past and do things differently.

Time travel is a confusing subject and I don’t understand any of the physics behind it. The paradoxes of time travel are interesting, though. I read a few articles on line about them. One entitled “5 Bizarre Paradoxes of Time Travel Explained” by Peter Christoforu on the web site Astronomy Trek made the subject fun and somewhat more accessible to me.

I thought about the time travel element in the movie Men in Black 3. Agent J travels back in time to kill the young Boris the Animal before the older Boris can kill Agent K and lead an invasion of earth in the future. If I understand Christoforu correctly, this might be an example of the Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox. If Agent J is successful, then he wouldn’t have a reason to return to the past in the first place. But Men in Black 3 probably treats the time travel idea in a farcical way, just like its farcical treatment of the whole idea of aliens.

Christoforu described a story which rang a bell. It’s toward the end of the article under the section heading “Are Time Paradoxes Inevitable?” The story is about a paleontologist who time travels back to the dinosaur era to shoot pictures of the giant reptiles. He doesn’t take any samples because it would likely alter the future. When the scientist returns to his own time, everything has changed. There are no humans and the world is wild. He can’t understand why until he looks at the bottom of his shoe, on which there is a crushed butterfly.

The reason this interested me is that there is a very similar story, published in 1952 by Ray Bradbury, entitled “A Sound of Thunder.” It was about a big game hunter who hired a safari company guide who used a time travel device to carry them back to the days of dinosaurs. Before departing, items in the agency displayed signs in English with typical English spelling. The hunter, although he was allowed to try to kill a dinosaur, was told not to touch anything else. However, on return, the agency was different. The signs showed dramatically different spelling, not typical English at all. On the bottom of the hunter’s shoe was a dead butterfly.

Anyway, I gather the main idea, according to Christoforu, rests on something called the Butterfly Effect, in which trivial changes can cause dramatic upheaval over the course of history.

I saw this on TV as well, maybe it was The Ray Bradbury Theater. That aired in 1989. It was made into a film in 2005, which did poorly and which I didn’t see.

The point is that you can do a lot of harm by interfering, even a little bit, with the past. Maybe it’s not so bad being without a time machine and believing that the second hand always moves forward.

I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve been saying that my wife has got me this or that item, like the pink dumbbells and whatnot. She also got me an extra yoga mat.

Part of the explanation is that I’ve recently had a birthday, which reminds me of the importance of time in my life–mainly because I have a shrinking supply of it. After all, I’m heading into the sunset of my journey on Earth.

Occasionally, I wonder what I ought to be trying to accomplish, if anything.

To achieve great things, two things are needed:
A plan and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein’s quote is encouraging in a way. Hey, I’ve already got half of it–I don’t have enough time. Now all I have to do is achieve some great things.

I could go on the road to promote my idea for a hit song, “Put your hand in the hand of the man with a plan to get a tan, lead a band, roam the land, avoid the bladder scan, zippity do dah shazam.”

All I have to do is come up with lyrics…and a melody…and an agent…and a band…and a voice coach…and some talent.

Now, if I’m going to accomplish something great, it would make sense to keep working on building a more harmonious balance in my everyday life. I’m doing some of that, including regular exercise, mindfulness practice, and healthy eating.

That reminds me, the birthday cake was excellent, especially topped with white chocolate vanilla ice cream.

Every so often, my former mindfulness teacher sends out an email message about the upcoming mindfulness classes. She always includes an inspirational quote, like the one below:

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
Even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

William Stafford – “Being a Person”

There was also a couple of suggestions for yoga and meditation techniques specifically to help you sleep. I recognized one of them as the body scan. The body scan is one of the first things they teach you in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

The body scan invariably put me to sleep, which made me feel like I wasn’t doing it right. Early on in the course, that was not exactly the “goal” of the body scan. Except mindfulness is not exactly a goal-oriented activity.

That’s hard to conceptualize. And so, the other class that is offered to those who make mindfulness practice a regular part of their lives are follow-up groups. It helps reaffirm the regular commitment to practice mindfulness.

I noticed one of the follow-up groups is entitled “Embracing the Paradoxes of Mindfulness.” The description of the course makes the point that mindfulness really isn’t about reaching a goal or achieving great things. It’s about being rather than doing. It’s hard for me to get my head around that after getting into and through medical school, residency, and practicing psychiatry for umpteen years. And now I’m making a transition to retirement.

One of my biggest fears about making and sticking to a mindfulness practice was that I often didn’t think I would have enough time for it. My teacher just advised me that I would simply have to make time.

Maybe I could accept the time I do have left and just be the geezer I am.