Time is weird
We are used to visualizing time as a horizontal arrow with past, present and future. I just read a book that offers a different point of view: time is a vertically stacked collection of “now’s”.
It’s not a new concept (Zen), but thinking about time in this way is liberating. “Now” is all we ever have. We can eliminate the illusion of being able to control the future (i.e. just deal with it when it becomes the “now”) and stop wasting time thinking about what should have been done differently in the past.
I especially love this in the context of Einstein’s relativity. Since the “arrow of time” implies a straight line, we know it’s incorrect. We measure our time based on revolutions of Earth on its axis, and around the Sun - this is actually not movement of time, but movement of us in space. And since Einstein proved (100 years ago although most of us still don’t grasp it) that time can bend, slow down or speed up, the visualization of time as a stack of “now’s” is much more realistic than the arrow.
Worth thinking about.