Time

Clocks are apparently simple, happy things with no worries. Like feathers in the wind, or perhaps going down a river.

Clocks give us the completely artificial impression that time is cyclic. That if we wait they will come back to the same position they were at before, and that they will continue to do so over and over and over again.

However, time, as far as we know it, is not cyclic (we don't really know what "time" actually "is", but let's forget about that "tiny" detail). Time is not like a watch, nor even a river. Water in a river can potentially come back to the same river over and over again, but time does not go back to before. It just runs in a single direction, apparently towards what we classify as infinity.

That's actually quite a big problem for what we would call "time-travelling". Even if we were to find a way to go "back in time", right here, we would quickly realise how that simply wasn't a very good idea. Even if we were to travel just a few days back in time, as we came out of our time-machine, we would simply die. We would be outside our planet, in a position that the Earth would occupy in a few days, but still really far away from it. But maybe we could go back inside, or have a really nice space-suit to protect us. And then we would probably think: well, ok, so let's just go back exactly one year back in time - surely the Earth goes back to the same position, so then we will be able to land on Earth.

We would soon find out that's not really the case. The Earth would be even further apart from where we would be. The problem is that not only does the Earth rotate around the Sun, the Sun also revolves around the centre of our Milky Way. And there's more: our Milky Way is moving towards Andromeda at even greater velocity; and both are moving towards a very strong potential well at even greater speeds.

So there you have it. Despite our silly/human views of how everything is cyclic and how time is just like that, reality is very, very different. We may not be able to see it at first, because our lifespan is so so small compared to the actual passage of time and its effects in the real Universe, but it is there.

This strange feeling we call "being alive"

There's this thing we call life. It's intrinsically complicated. Weird, as in it probably shouldn't exist. But probably not as weird as being alive.

Life, as far as we know, is quite good at obeying the laws of physics. It simply knows them well enough to manipulate them towards whatever life's "goals" are (does life have a goal?). It does not break the speed of light. It is still governed by the same laws as the things we consider not to be alive. But being alive is a whole other level of weirdness. Because being alive does seem to break the laws of physics. All the time.

Let's be clear: maybe being alive does not necessarily break the laws of physics. But only if being alive is not a "real" thing. Or if it only happens for a period of time that is so short that it doesn't really matter.  Still, regardless of the "reality" of our "being alive" "sensation", we still feel it, and, in fact, we can't really feel anything else. So the entire perception, interpretation and analysis of the "reality" around us, its laws and physics, is fully obtained under this weird state of "being alive". Under this constant "high" that continuously defies and breaks the same laws and forces we try to pin down and understand. So how can we even trust our own ideas of the world around us? How can we trust anything? How can we believe things actually exist?

Being alive is all we ever know. The rest may be either an illusion, or a completely distorted idea of what the actual "reality" may be.