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Escaping The Mobius Strip of Time

Gau kamb December 24, 2007

Tags: deja vu , new years , resolutions

Deja vu of New Years Resolutions

Another Christmas, another year coming to an end. Out with the old, in with the new. The king is dead, long live the king. Forget the New Years resolutions, lets do the New Years Resolutions. How many times have we gone through this before. I can vouch for myself and safely say PLENTY.

Even on an
microscopic level, this cycle is ever present. A whole day, a whole week a whole month passes by without even a “by your leave” and yet. And yet, you wake up every day and think I will do this today, and at days end realise you forgot all about it. You repeat the process again the next morning when you stare at your swollen grubby face in the mirror. And suddenly, yes suddenly that something happens.
You get butterflies in your stomach. You enter your office or return home that evening with a great deal of trepidation, almost wanting your boss at work or at home to give you that tongue lashing for being a forgetful numbskull. Always the same ...

This past week.....

Its been one of those weeks when nothing much happens, but a lot has to happen. I have had many such weeks in my long career so far, and yet, this week in particular there is that uncertainty hanging in the air. A feeling I have missed something, overlooked something obvious and it is going to have some serious repercussions later on at some other point. A point which cannot be pin-pointed with any degree of accuracy. For the first time in a rather short life time, but a long career time, there is a need for clairvoyance, a fortune teller - better still the ability to gaze into the crystal ball and reveal the future to myself.

Uncertainty is something which I can deal with and have dealt with all my life. All of the problems I have solved or tackled have uncertainty with panache - of course this uncertainty had some wonderful properties and symmetry etc.
This time round, the uncertainty is in the gut. My friends and partner call it butterflies in the stomach. According to then this is a result of my laziness in completing tasks in recent times. It is only now I am realising that they are all coming home to roost.

This is all hog-wash. I am gung-ho and always willing to meet life's challenges head on. Naah! this is different. There is a sense of vulnerability in the air. I am reminded of the Asterix Comics and the 'sky-falling' syndrome here. It is definitely going to fall all round me and it is going to bury me. Just think about the possibilities here. The sky falling on us. The universe contracting on us in the matter of minutes. Hell, we would all be compressed to a tiny point - a singular point where nothing exists, but everything exists.

Contemplate on this possibility. We could become microscopic and perhaps still exist? Would this be the same as now but only smaller? Would the dynamics of the universe change or remain the same - that is only change in scale all the way through. What if this has already happened, and that we are in this tiny universe in reality and that all we are doing is really microscopic - even space travel is really like going from one table to another in a restaurant. And that there is an even larger universe outside. Its as if the life of a microbe is magnified many times over. Naah! Stuff of the asylum. I like the Russian Dolls. Where you find an identical doll inside another till you reach the smallest. theoretically you should be able to keep repeating this till you get a tiny speck of a doll inside.

The thing which really gets me is this feeling of deja vu. The comprehension of time is different as we grow old. A day in the life of a single -digit year old kid is different in length to a teenager, is different to a middle aged man, is different to an old person. The occasions when deja vu come about increases with age, and after some time you become oblivious to it all. Deja vu is like the mobius strip - it is the syndrome of seeing the same thing happen twice.
The mobius strip - you are in and out at the same time. Put in a few more twists, and you can repeat this more times within one cycle. As we grow old the number of twists in the strip increases, and those moments of deja vu increase. Till such time that the number of twists are so many that really the properties of the twists are microscopic compared to those of the strip itself. Does Deja vu does make sense in old age!

May be I have been having these episodes of deja vu more frequently these days. This has resulted in a compulsive navel gazing exercises, and what a waste of time it has been. Or has it?

The Whole Damn Year......

Somehow, this year has been uneventful. No one bothered me, and me no one. Its as if, I have forgotten something or everyone has forgotten me. But then most years, especially year ends are like this. Oh, well New Years round the corner, I can set up a new wall chart with my Resolutions.
May be have a flow chart with tick boxes, so that that I can review my progress through the year and at year end and escape this feeling of being on a Mobius Strip. As they say, watch this space!

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