Give me all the time I need to find my way to what I’m seeking, and you’ll have to offer me infinity. I barely know my mind since many of the skills I’ve explored came and went as they evolved to grow into something else once I had become acquainted with them. The constraints on my day are not rigid other than the limitations imposed by the mechanics that life demands. I must eat, defecate, and sleep, but besides that, I’m allowed to surf the boundaries of my knowledge. I don’t mean to deny the luxury of living comfortably in the West while being afforded the opportunity to dance with myself. I need not struggle to find food and shelter but draw my own map of where I want to take myself.

Time is the elastic perception of how we relate to a world and its constraints. When we rush into the next best thing, we destroy our ability to gaze patiently into the infinite. To slow down the passage of time, we must master the boring, allowing ourselves to slip into our unfolding reality without the struggle of an adolescent mind demanding certainty and immediate knowledge. That old saying, “Patience is a virtue,” is key to living a long life, even if it might otherwise be considered short.

Then, in a moment, I lose track of time in some form of novelty where the gravity of information breaks time, and my brain must bring its full focus to bear. This typically occurs when I’m dealing with a subject or situation that I wrap my undivided attention around to comprehend what’s what. On the other hand, the familiar panders to our lazy nature, and this is where people see time accelerate. The habituated, redundant, and well-known does not allow the structures of perception to be stretched, and time is simply lost.

I’ll share two examples of time dilation. First, today, I saw the announcement that a bunch of DSP engineers would be streaming a talk about coding plugins focusing on audio effects. One of the speakers was Sean Costello of Valhalla DSP who I’m familiar with as I own a couple of his VSTs for reverb and delay. It was through Sean’s Tweet that I learned of the “Drunk DSP” Zoom talk, but that was about the extent of my knowledge of what might be streamed. This talk was for serious nerds interested in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and the banter between engineers from Eventide, Ableton, Valhalla, Neural DSP, Newfangled Audio, and Edinburgh University. They discussed the merits of learning C++ versus Python. Universities teach Python but that is not used for creating products. The professor from Edinburgh explained they want to teach the physics of sound theory, not how to make products. Environments for prototyping, such as the JULIA high-performance language, which is supposed to be great for visualization and complex coding situations that might also require parallel processing, were spoken of. Another engineer touched on Bayesian inference, which is a statistical theorem looking at learning from experience for machines. And finally a short discussion about Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), where DFTs transform signals from the time domain while FFTs are concerned with the frequency domain.

For my second example, last year, we were on the Tara River in Montenegro, navigating rapids in whitewater. The rain was hammering down with a nearby thunderstorm hitting hard; the sound rippled through the canyon, causing a bit of anxiety. We are in a country in which we do not speak the language, deep in a forested canyon that is beautiful and new to our senses. While we are trying to take in the spectacle of this National Park we are also listening to our local guides who were assisting the Croatian organizer of this adventure as we paddled down the river. Earlier in the day, the sounds of Croatian folk music and a shot of Slivovitz before coffee and breakfast had started the morning. From the flooded muddy river to a shoreside lunch near a natural spring we were inundated with new information at every corner and in every moment of the day and well into the night.

What I’m trying to point out here is that both experiences, one a 2-hour long video stream and the other being 18 hours of an epic two-week journey, were both deep learning moments of relatively equal merit. The focus required to make sense of them doesn’t allow you to pay attention with half an ear. In the latter example, not paying attention risks losing your life, while in the first example, nothing may be at risk, but in a sense, there is. You see, to not look into the mystery of the unknown, you relinquish your right to peer into the infinite. Passive nonsense is the sweet we treat ourselves with after a hard day, except that we have somehow equated simple existence as difficult and always requiring the same old pablum to alleviate the pain of being alive.

In that sense, we have become a sad species addicted to our creature comforts, enslaved by the reliance on video games, TV, movies, weed, bad food, snacks, drugs, alcohol, religion, and the host of other crutches we believe we deserve due to what was just endured.

The things I experience and what I choose to entertain myself and learn from are not anyone else’s tools that will make their lives better, but neither are other’s groupthink coping mechanisms. We are programmed to find satisfaction and accomplishment in life when we are challenged at the edge of what we know. It is here on the frontier of our ignorance and our feeble attempts to conquer that darkness that time opens up, and life is no longer fleeting as though it’s in a race to find the finish line. In the struggle to find the unknown, time becomes expansive and slow but arrives with the risk of boredom. This boredom must be embraced by examining in great detail the intricacies of existence, information, life, knowledge, and maybe someday wisdom. Else, in a second, life will be over, and you’ll wonder, “Why didn’t I take the time to see the world as it is instead of through the filter of routine?”