time | Ascension Lifestyle

19 Aug 2024
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Aging hits us in our 40s and 60s. But well-being doesn’t have to fall off a cliff.

This week I came across research that suggests aging hits us in waves. You might feel like you’re on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level, you’re likely to be hit by two waves of changes, according to the scientists behind the work. The first one comes in your 40s. Eek.

These clocks promise to measure biological age and help identify anti-aging drugs, but there are lingering questions over their accuracy.

For the study, Michael Snyder at Stanford University and his colleagues collected a vast amount of biological data from 108 volunteers aged 25 to 75, all of whom were living in California. Their approach was to gather as much information as they could and look for age-related patterns afterward.

This approach can lead to some startling revelations, including the one about the impacts of age on 40-year-olds (who, I was horrified to learn this week, are generally considered “middle-aged”). It can help us answer some big questions about aging, and even potentially help us find drugs to counter some of the most unpleasant aspects of the process.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. And midlife needn’t involve falling off a cliff in terms of your well-being. Let’s explore why.

First, the study, which was published in the journal Nature Aging. Snyder and his colleagues collected a real trove of data on their volunteers, including on gene expression, proteins, metabolites, and various other chemical markers. The team also swabbed volunteers’ skin, stool, mouths, and noses to get an idea of the microbial communities that might be living there.

Each volunteer gave up these samples every few months for a median period of 1.7 years, and the team ended up with a total of 5,405 samples, which included over 135,000 biological features. “The idea is to get a very complete picture of people’s health,” says Snyder.

When he and his colleagues analyzed the data, they found that around 7% of the molecules and microbes measured changes gradually over time, in a linear way. On the other hand, 81% of them changed at specific life stages. There seem to be two that are particularly important: one at around the age of 44, and another around the age of 60.

Some of the dramatic changes at age 60 seem to be linked to kidney and heart function, and diseases like atherosclerosis, which narrows the arteries.

That makes sense, given that our risks of developing cardiovascular diseases increase dramatically as we age—around 40% of 40- to 59-year-olds have such disorders, and this figure rises to 75% for 60- to 79-year-olds.

Aging clocks estimate how fast specific organs are deteriorating—but it’s hard to know what to do with the results.

But the changes that occur around the age of 40 came as a surprise to Snyder. He says that, on reflection, they make intuitive sense. Many of us start to feel a bit creakier once we hit 40, and it can take longer to recover from injuries, for example.

Other changes suggest that our ability to metabolize lipids and alcohol shifts when we reach our 40s, though it’s hard to say why, for a few reasons.

First, it’s not clear if a change in alcohol metabolism, for example, means that we are less able to break down alcohol, or if people are just consuming less of it when they’re older.

This gets us to a central question about aging: Is it an inbuilt program that sets us on a course of deterioration, or is it merely a consequence of living?

We don’t have an answer to that one, yet. It’s probably a combination of both. Our bodies are exposed to various environmental stressors over time. But also, as our cells age, they are less able to divide, and clear out the molecular garbage they accumulate over time.

It’s also hard to tell what’s happening in this study, because the research team didn’t measure more physiological markers of aging, such as muscle strength or frailty, says Colin Selman, a biogerontologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

There’s another, perhaps less scientific, question that comes to mind. How worried should we be about these kinds of molecular changes?

I’m approaching 40—should I panic? I asked Sara Hägg, who studies the molecular epidemiology of aging at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “No,” was her immediate answer.

While Snyder’s team collected a vast amount of data, it was from a relatively small number of people over a relatively short period of time. None of them were tracked for the two or three decades you’d need to see the two waves of molecular changes occur in a person.

“This is an observational study, and they compare different people,” Hägg told me.

“There is absolutely no evidence that this is going to happen to you.” After all, there’s a lot that can happen in a person’s life over 20 or 30 years. They might take up a sport. They might quit smoking or stop eating meat.

However, the findings do support the idea that aging is not a linear process.

“People have always suggested that you’re on this decline in your life from [around the age of] 40, depressingly,” says Selman. “But it’s not quite as simple as that.”

Snyder hopes that studies like his will help reveal potential new targets for therapies that help counteract some of the harmful molecular shifts associated with aging. “People’s healthspan is 11 to 15 years shorter than their lifespan,” he says. “Ideally you’d want to live for as long as possible [in good health], and then die.”

We don’t have any such drugs yet.

For now, it all comes down to the age-old advice about eating well, sleeping well, getting enough exercise, and avoiding the big no-nos like smoking and alcohol.

I happened to speak to Selman at the end of what had been a particularly difficult day, and I confessed that I was looking forward to enjoying an evening glass of wine. That’s despite the fact that research suggests that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption.

“A little bit of alcohol is actually quite nice,” Selman agreed.

He told me about an experience he’d had once at a conference on aging. Some of the attendees were members of a society that practiced caloric restriction—the idea being that cutting your calories can boost your lifespan (we don’t yet know if this works for people). “There was a big banquet… and these people all had little scales, and were weighing their salads on the scales,” he told me. “To me, that seems like a rather miserable way to live your life.”

I’m all for finding balance between healthy lifestyle choices and those that bring me joy. And it’s worth remembering that no amount of deprivation is going to radically extend our lifespans. As Selman puts it: “We can do certain things, but ultimately, when your time’s up, your time’s up.”

Original article here

14 Aug 2024
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Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various portals in science, we revisited our 2014 video interview with Tegmark (transcribed below for the first time), in which the professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains why the feeling of time is one thing and the math quite another. That Tegmark, also the author of 2017’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, takes the keenest pleasure from peering into the world through the kaleidoscope of his physics toolbox is amply clear. During our interview, leaning out of his chair, waving his arms, pouring his water bottle onto the carpeted hotel floor to drive home a point, he was in a constant state of animation, much like the objects (both microscopic and gargantuan) that he studies.

You say time doesn’t flow, but our subjective perception is that it does. Where do we go wrong?

It certainly feels to us like time is flowing. Yet that’s not the only way of looking at this reality. I could say that 10 to the power of 29 particles constitute me, and they are moving around in some very complicated patterns. Einstein pointed out that the most elegant way of describing this mathematically is to say, Let’s look at where each particle is in the three-dimensional space at each time, and draw this in a four-dimensional spacetime, where time is the fourth dimension.

If I have a particle that is part of my knee, which hasn’t moved, that particle corresponds to a line. At all times, it’s at the same place. If I look at a particle that’s part of a red blood cell, which has been constantly orbiting around my circulatory system, it’s making a super fascinating shape in spacetime. If I look at all my red blood cells together, they would make a braid pattern, making this incredible tangle in spacetime. If you look at the electron in my brain while I’m thinking, it’s even more complicated. But it’s still just a four-dimensional pattern. So I can either say that reality is a complicated pattern of four dimensions, or I could say it’s this stuff that feels like it’s changing and moving around. Which is more fundamental? Which is more correct? These are just two different ways of describing the same thing.

It’s funny how physics, like any field, has a small number of hot-button issues that people get very emotional about

Is it part of the scientist’s job to explain why things feel the way they do?

We’ve seen a lot of examples of how things feel very different from the way they look in the equations. I would argue that almost all of the big breakthroughs in physics have this as their most difficult element. If you rewind to when Einstein came up with special relativity, you would find people like Lorentz and Minkowski had already written down a lot of the math. But Einstein was the guy who managed to figure out what it was going to feel like. He said if these are the equations, the way it’s going to feel is if you go near the speed of light, you’re going to feel time slowing down. And people said, Whoa, that’s really weird! Then they did the experiment and it’s correct. I had a fun conversation with physicist David Wineland. He told me that he’d built two atomic clocks that are super precise, and put one of them one foot below the other, and was able to measure that it runs slower!

Then quantum mechanics came along. It’s so complicated people still argue about it 100 years later! The math, though, is beautiful and clean. Randomness is fundamentally an illusion because there is no randomness in the math, even though it might feel random. I’m saying the same thing about time. Even though the flow of time is fundamentally an illusion, there is nothing flowing about the math, the equations aren’t changing, there is just a single four-dimensional pattern, albeit a very complicated and beautiful one, in spacetime. If you study it carefully, you’ll realize it’s going to feel like a flow of time. As physicists, that’s ultimately what we need to explain: Why does everything feel the way it does? We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that things will always feel the way they actually are, because the history of physics is a long sequence of examples of where we realize that the ultimate nature of things is very different from how they feel.

If time doesn’t flow, how do we understand the second law of thermodynamics, which says that time flows in the direction of increasing entropy?

It’s funny how physics, just like any field, has a small number of hot-button issues that people get very emotional about. Time and specifically the so-called second law of thermodynamics is one of them. It’s a simple statement that on average things keep getting messier. That lets you define the direction of time. But there has been a lot of controversy about it. On the one hand, there are people like Arthur Eddington, who tend to view this as almost a holy principle. It’s sacred and shouldn’t ever be questioned. He has this famous line where he says, Well, all sorts of things might turn out to be wrong, but if some theorist ever challenges the second law of thermodynamics, then too bad for that theorist, because there’s no hope for him other than the utmost humiliation! On the other hand, a lot of other people say, Look, we shouldn’t have any holy cows in physics, everything must be questioned, including the second law of thermodynamics.

It’s like the ending of Life of Brian, where they say, “You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost?”

What’s questionable about the second law of thermodynamics?

It’s turned out you can derive the second law of thermodynamics from more fundamental things. Let’s say I did something clumsy like spill water on the carpet. If I played a video of it backward, and you saw the water come off the carpet and go into the bottle, it would look totally wrong. But if you just zoom in and look at the motion of the particles flying through the other particles of the air, it would look perfectly reasonable backward, just like a bunch of bowling balls bouncing the other way. After 100 years of thinking about this, we’ve come to realize the explanation is surprising. It has to do with what happened 13.8 billion years ago. The reason our universe keeps getting messier is because it started in a tidy state yesterday, which was even tidier the day before, and even tidier 13.8 billion years ago.

Why did the universe start in such a tidy state?

What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium; de Sitter space, as we call it—there will be no sense of time anymore. There will nothing you can do to determine whether time is going one way or the other. Time will then have un-emerged again. It will be like the poem, This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

What if I looked at my wristwatch then? Would it tick forward?

There wouldn’t be a wristwatch because all the atoms, or all the protons in your wristwatch, would’ve decayed. All the particles that had decayed would’ve left the cosmic horizon. If there were a wristwatch, and it’s functioning, there will be a sense of time and change. But just like there hasn’t always been a wristwatch, there will not necessarily always be one.

How is measuring time related to the existence of time?

It sounds crass to say that time is what we measure with a clock. But it is a very deep fact that if there are no clocks—bearing in mind that every atom is a clock, in the sense that something is going around something else, which you can think of as a clock—then it’s not change which has gone but the whole ability to define time, and the whole ability to perceive time will also be gone. So in that way, time could’ve emerged from nothing, and might also go back to nothing. It’s like the ending of one of my favorite movies, Life of Brian, with Monty Python, where they say, “You come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!” Well, we’ll see!

Original article here

30 Dec 2023
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I’ve researched time for 15 years – here’s how my perception of it has changed

Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A lot of people only appreciate time when they have an experience that makes them realise how limited it is.

My own interest in time grew from one of those “time is running out” experiences. Eighteen years ago, while at university, I was driving down a country lane when another vehicle strayed onto my side of the road and collided with my car. I can still vividly remember the way in which time slowed down, grinding to a near halt, in the moments before my car impacted with the oncoming vehicle. Time literally seemed to stand still. The elasticity of time and its ability to wax and wane in different situations shone out like never before. From that moment I was hooked.

I have spent the last 15 years trying to answer questions such as: Why does time slow down in near death situations? Does time really pass more quickly as you get older? How do our brains process time?

My attempts to answer these questions often involve putting people into extreme situations to explore how their experience of time is affected. Some of the participants in my experiments have been given electric shocks to induce pain, others have traversed 100-metre-high crumbling bridges (albeit in virtual reality), some have even spent 12 months in isolation on Antarctica. At the heart of this work is an attempt to understand how our interaction with our environment shapes our experience of time.

Thinking time

This research has taught me that time’s flexibility is an inherent part of the way in which we process it. We are not like clocks, which record seconds and minutes with perfect accuracy. Instead, our brain appears to be wired to perceive time in a way that is responsive to the world around us.

The way in which our brain processes time is closely related to the way in which it processes emotion. This is because some of the brain areas involved in the regulation of emotional and physiological arousal are also involved in the processing of time. During heightened emotion, the activation caused by the brain attempts to maintain stability, which alters its ability to process time.

So, when we experience fear, joy, anxiety or sadness, emotional processing and time processing interact. This results in the sensation of time passing more speeding up or slowing down. Time really does fly when you’re having fun and drag when you’re bored.

Changes in our experience of time are most profound during periods of extreme emotion. In near death experiences, like my car crash for example, time slows to the point of stopping. We don’t know why our brains distort sensory information during trauma.

Ancient adaptations

One possibility is that time distortions are an evolutionary survival intervention. Our perception of time may be fundamental to our fight and flight response. This insight into time has taught me that in times of crisis, knee jerk responses are unlikely to be the best ones. Instead, it would seem that slowing down helps me succeed.

Being a time-nerd, I spend a lot of time thinking about time. Before COVID, I would have said that I thought about it more than most. However, this changed during the pandemic.

Think back to those early lockdown days. Time started to slip and slide like never before. Hours sometimes felt like weeks and days merged into one another. Newspaper headlines and social media were awash with the idea that COVID had mangled our sense of time. They were not wrong. COVID time-warps were observed around the world. One study found that 80% of participants felt like time slowed down during the second English lockdown.

We no longer had a choice about how and when we spent our time. Home-time, work-time and me-time were suddenly rolled into one. This loss of control over our schedules made us pay attention to time. People now appear less willing to “waste time” commuting and instead place a greater value on jobs with flexibility over where and when you work. Governments and employers still appear unsure how to grapple with the ever-changing time landscape. What does seem clear however is that COVID permanently altered our relationship with time.

Unfortunately, one downside to having greater awareness of time is greater realisation of just how finite it is. This year I turned 40, my eldest child started high school and my youngest started primary school. What made these events so sobering for me was the fact that in my head, I am still only 23 years old. How can I already be halfway to 80? Is there anyway that I can slow time down?

Knowing that my actions and emotions can have a profound impact on my sense of time opens the tantalising possibility that one day I might be able to control my own experience of time. I often wonder if we may be able to harness the brain’s ability to distort time and somehow re-purpose it so that we can control how we experience it. Then, trips to the dentist could feel like seconds not minutes and holidays would no longer be over in the blink of an eye.

Even though we may be a long way from controlling time, my research has taught me just how precious time is.

Original article here

14 Jul 2023
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The 8 Types of Boundaries We Should All Be Setting

A friend overstepping, a family member oversharing or a work colleague who you’re fed up with talking to you like crap. It may feel like these are just the occasional, yet inevitable, less-than-ideal parts of life, but really there’s an answer to minimising them all: better boundaries.

We all have boundaries, but many of us struggle to express them, particularly in tense situations where we want to avoid conflict as much as possible. However, it’s true that, like a muscle, the more you practice setting boundaries, the stronger you feel doing so.

Why are boundaries so important?

In an Instagram post, Nawal Mustafa, aka The Brain Coach, set out the importance of clear, firm and supportive boundaries in every aspect of our lives. “Boundaries are a way for us to honour our needs, set realistic expectations, and teach others how to treat us,” she explains. “They are a form of self-care and self-love that allow us to protect our energy and psychological health.”

Physical boundaries

Mustafa explains that this includes who is allowed in your personal space, who can touch you and how close someone can get to you, as well as what you choose to put into your body. Subtle violations of this boundary might look like pressure to drink alcohol when you’ve said you don’t want to (“Go one, one won’t hurt”) to unsolicited comments on your appearance (“You’ve lost weight since I last saw you!”).

Even in situations where these breaches are more annoying than damaging, remember that you are always within your right to ask someone to stop.

Emotional boundaries

Some of the hardest to maintain, emotional boundaries can look like not taking on other people’s emotional burdens (aka trauma dumping) and not engaging in triggering topics.

Especially in close relationships like with family and friends, it can be awkward and difficult to express your need for some distance. Mustafa suggests helpful phrases like “I want to support you but I have too much on my plate right now” and “I don’t have the emotional capacity to talk about politics” as ways you can kindly but firmly reclaim your emotional space.

Communication boundaries

These can often be most apparent in the workplace, where you may have to raise issues with how someone is speaking to you, as well as what you yourself can and cannot say. However, they also come into play in other areas of our lives, such as wanting to maintain privacy.

Being clear on what you deem acceptable is the best route to success, Mustafa indicates. If you’re not ready to talk about something, dislike the tone you’re being spoken to in or feel demeaned by name-calling or being dismissed, be explicit about your barriers.

While you can’t guarantee they will react in kind, you’ll know that you’ve done everything you can to protect your wellbeing.

Financial boundaries

Money has long been taboo, particularly with family and friends, but amid a cost of living crisis and rising inflation, now is also the time when we’re feeling the most stretched and need to put limits in place.

Whether you’ve been invited somewhere that’s too expensive, need to ask a friend to pay you back or want to politely decline loaning someone money, try not to let any feelings of guilt or embarrassment overpower you.

The reality is that every person has different spending priorities, salaries and financial boundaries, so it’s time we all stopped being so awkward about communicating them.

Mental boundaries

We often forget how important it is to set boundaries with ourselves, too. Instead of a punishment or indication that we’ve done something wrong, it helps to see personal boundaries as practice in self-trust and confidence.

Mustafa shares that important mental boundaries include allowing ourselves to have personal thoughts, beliefs and opinions that differ from others, and being OK with others not agreeing with us.

If you have people-pleasing tendencies, these may be hard to maintain, but the mantra: “It’s OK if you don’t agree with me” is a good one to keep in mind.

Time boundaries

If you’re the kind of person that gets sucked in helping out a friend before realising you’ve no time left to work on yourself, take note. Mustafa explains that we should also monitor how much time we choose to spend with others, as well as how others should respect our time.

A family member that’s always late? Tell them. A friend that will call and call and call until you pick up? Let them know that you can chat, but only for 15 minutes.

The same goes for rejecting invitations. Don’t feel pressured to spend your time somewhere you don’t want or need to be.

Energy boundaries

Similarly, continually putting the wants and needs of others before our own can be seriously draining, leading us to emotional exhaustion.

While “protect your energy” might sound like just another therapy slogan, it’s actually a valuable lesson in how the people you surround yourself with can impact your mood.

If a family member, friend or colleague is going beyond needy and veering into enmeshed relationship territory, it may be time to set some firmer boundaries.

Relationship boundaries

Encompassing all of the previous elements, relationship boundaries relate to how people can treat us, how they behave around us and what they can expect from us.

“Boundaries can be applied in many different aspects of life, such as our time, our emotions, our physical space, and our mental energy,” adds Mustafa.

“Setting boundaries is not easy to do, especially if you have lived most of your life in an environment where we don’t see other people setting or respecting boundaries. It may feel very uncomfortable at first, but with time, it will get easier and you will feel more confident and at peace.”

Original article here

18 Jun 2023
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Can We Time Travel? A Theoretical Physicist Provides Some Answers

Time travel makes regular appearances in popular culture, with innumerable time travel storylines in movies, television and literature. But it is a surprisingly old idea: one can argue that the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles over 2,500 years ago, is the first time travel story.

But is time travel in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a theoretical physicist, I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.

The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics or relativity. There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.

There is also the matter of time-travel paradoxes; we can — hypothetically — resolve these if free will is an illusion, if many worlds exist or if the past can only be witnessed but not experienced. Perhaps time travel is impossible simply because time must flow in a linear manner and we have no control over it, or perhaps time is an illusion and time travel is irrelevant.

Laws of Physics

Since Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the nature of time, space and gravity — is our most profound theory of time, we would like to think that time travel is forbidden by relativity. Unfortunately, one of his colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Study, Kurt Gödel, invented a universe in which time travel was not just possible, but the past and future were inextricably tangled.

We can actually design time machines, but most of these (in principle) successful proposals require negative energy, or negative mass, which does not seem to exist in our universe. If you drop a tennis ball of negative mass, it will fall upwards. This argument is rather unsatisfactory, since it explains why we cannot time travel in practice only by involving another idea — that of negative energy or mass — that we do not really understand.

Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler conceptualized a time machine that does not involve negative mass, but requires more energy than exists in the universe.

Time travel also violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy or randomness must always increase. Time can only move in one direction — in other words, you cannot unscramble an egg. More specifically, by travelling into the past we are going from now (a high entropy state) into the past, which must have lower entropy.

This argument originated with the English cosmologist Arthur Eddington, and is at best incomplete. Perhaps it stops you travelling into the past, but it says nothing about time travel into the future. In practice, it is just as hard for me to travel to next Thursday as it is to travel to last Thursday.

Resolving Paradoxes

There is no doubt that if we could time travel freely, we run into the paradoxes. The best known is the “grandfather paradox”: one could hypothetically use a time machine to travel to the past and murder their grandfather before their father’s conception, thereby eliminating the possibility of their own birth. Logically, you cannot both exist and not exist.

Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, describes how to evade the grandfather paradox. If free will simply does not exist, it is not possible to kill one’s grandfather in the past, since he was not killed in the past. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, can only travel to other points on his world line (the timeline he exists in), but not to any other point in space-time, so he could not even contemplate killing his grandfather.

The universe in Slaughterhouse-Five is consistent with everything we know. The second law of thermodynamics works perfectly well within it and there is no conflict with relativity. But it is inconsistent with some things we believe in, like free will — you can observe the past, like watching a movie, but you cannot interfere with the actions of people in it.

Could we allow for actual modifications of the past, so that we could go back and murder our grandfather — or Hitler? There are several multiverse theories that suppose that there are many timelines for different universes. This is also an old idea: in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences two alternative timelines, one of which leads to a shameful death and the other to happiness.

Time Is a River

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that:

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

We can imagine that time does flow past every point in the universe, like a river around a rock. But it is difficult to make the idea precise. A flow is a rate of change — the flow of a river is the amount of water that passes a specific length in a given time. Hence if time is a flow, it is at the rate of one second per second, which is not a very useful insight.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that a “chronology protection conjecture” must exist, an as-yet-unknown physical principle that forbids time travel. Hawking’s concept originates from the idea that we cannot know what goes on inside a black hole, because we cannot get information out of it. But this argument is redundant: we cannot time travel because we cannot time travel!

Researchers are investigating a more fundamental theory, where time and space “emerge” from something else. This is referred to as quantum gravity, but unfortunately it does not exist yet.

So is time travel possible? Probably not, but we don’t know for sure!

Original article here

07 Jun 2023
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The length of Earth’s days has been mysteriously increasing, and scientists don’t know why

Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don’t know why.

This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.

Over the past few decades, Earth’s rotation around its axis – which determines how long a day is – has been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so.

But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown – days are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.

While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation varies ever so slightly. These changes occur over periods of millions of years to almost instantly – even earthquakes and storm events can play a role.

It turns out a day is very rarely exactly the magic number of 86,400 seconds.

The ever-changing planet

Over millions of years, Earth’s rotation has been slowing down due to friction effects associated with the tides driven by the Moon. That process adds about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century. A few billion years ago an Earth day was only about 19 hours.

For the past 20,000 years, another process has been working in the opposite direction, speeding up Earth’s rotation. When the last ice age ended, melting polar ice sheets reduced surface pressure, and Earth’s mantle started steadily moving toward the poles.

Just as a ballet dancer spins faster as they bring their arms toward their body – the axis around which they spin – so our planet’s spin rate increases when this mass of mantle moves closer to Earth’s axis. And this process shortens each day by about 0.6 milliseconds each century.

Over decades and longer, the connection between Earth’s interior and surface comes into play too. Major earthquakes can change the length of day, although normally by small amounts. For example, the Great Tōhoku Earthquake of 2011 in Japan, with a magnitude of 8.9, is believed to have sped up Earth’s rotation by a relatively tiny 1.8 microseconds.

Apart from these large-scale changes, over shorter periods weather and climate also have important impacts on Earth’s rotation, causing variations in both directions.

The fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles move mass around the planet, causing changes in the length of day by up to a millisecond in either direction. We can see tidal variations in length-of-day records over periods as long as 18.6 years. The movement of our atmosphere has a particularly strong effect, and ocean currents also play a role. Seasonal snow cover and rainfall, or groundwater extraction, alter things further.

Why is Earth suddenly slowing down?

Since the 1960s, when operators of radio telescopes around the planet started to devise techniques to simultaneously observe cosmic objects like quasars, we have had very precise estimates of Earth’s rate of rotation.

A comparison between these estimates and an atomic clock has revealed a seemingly ever-shortening length of day over the past few years.

But there’s a surprising reveal once we take away the rotation speed fluctuations we know happen due to the tides and seasonal effects. Despite Earth reaching its shortest day on June 29 2022, the long-term trajectory seems to have shifted from shortening to lengthening since 2020. This change is unprecedented over the past 50 years.

The reason for this change is not clear. It could be due to changes in weather systems, with back-to-back La Niña events, although these have occurred before. It could be increased melting of the ice sheets, although those have not deviated hugely from their steady rate of melt in recent years. Could it be related to the huge volcano explosion in Tonga injecting huge amounts of water into the atmosphere? Probably not, given that occurred in January 2022.

Scientists have speculated this recent, mysterious change in the planet’s rotational speed is related to a phenomenon called the “Chandler wobble” – a small deviation in Earth’s rotation axis with a period of about 430 days. Observations from radio telescopes also show that the wobble has diminished in recent years; the two may be linked.

One final possibility, which we think is plausible, is that nothing specific has changed inside or around Earth. It could just be long-term tidal effects working in parallel with other periodic processes to produce a temporary change in Earth’s rotation rate.

Do we need a ‘negative leap second’?

Precisely understanding Earth’s rotation rate is crucial for a host of applications – navigation systems such as GPS wouldn’t work without it. Also, every few years timekeepers insert leap seconds into our official timescales to make sure they don’t drift out of sync with our planet.

If Earth were to shift to even longer days, we may need to incorporate a “negative leap second” – this would be unprecedented, and may break the internet.

The need for negative leap seconds is regarded as unlikely right now. For now, we can welcome the news that – at least for a while – we all have a few extra milliseconds each day.

Original article here

01 May 2023
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Who Invented the Measurement of Time?

In modern times, clocks underpin everything people do, from work to school to sleep. Timekeeping is also the invisible structure that makes modern infrastructure work. It forms the foundation of the high-speed computers that conduct financial trading and even the GPS system that pinpoints locations on Earth’s surface with unprecedented accuracy.

But humans have likely lived by some version of the clock for a very long time. The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago. Before that, people likely tracked time with devices that did not survive in the archaeological record—such as an upright stick in the dirt that acted as a primitive sundial—or no device at all, says Rita Gautschy, an archeoastronomer at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

“It’s really difficult to get a grip on when people started with timekeeping,” Gautschy says. Simply by observing the location of the sunrise and the sunset each day and by watching how high the sun reaches in the sky, a person can construct a primitive calendar. These early human efforts at understanding the flow of time left no trace at all, she says.

The oldest sundial on record came from Egypt and was made around 1500 B.C.E. It consisted of a simple upright stick and a roughly semicircular base divided into 12 pie-shaped sections. The shadow of the stick gave an approximate hour of the day. Other early sundials measured time by the length of a stick’s shadow as the sun moved across the sky rather than by the movement of the shadow across the base, Gautschy says.

“It’s a first step, and if you accomplish this step, you can do fine-tuning and also adapt to different months,” she says. Sundials must account for both time of year and latitude to be truly accurate.

During the night, ancient people could track time by the apparent movement of the stars from east to west, Gautschy says. And for measuring discrete units of time, they used water clocks. These were vessels that either had holes for water to flow out of at a constant rate or were filled from another vessel and had markings on the inside to indicate increments of time. The oldest surviving water clocks were found in Egypt and Babylon, and the earliest of these date to around 1500 B.C.E. In China historical records claim that water clocks were invented by the Yellow Emperor, or Huangdi, a half-historical, half-mythical figure said to have lived between 2717 and 2599 B.C.E., says Zheng-Hui Hwang, a mechanical engineer at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, who has written about the history of ancient Chinese timekeeping devices. The earliest Chinese water clocks were probably outflow devices and were known as louke. The unit ke divided the day into 100 equal segments from midnight to midnight. Over time, Hwang says, inventors made these clocks more sophisticated by equipping them with multiple water supply vessels or otherwise adjusting them to ensure the rate of water flow remained stable.

Water would eventually lead to some extremely sophisticated timekeeping: by the early 700s C.E., Tang Dynasty monks developed a mechanical clock powered by a water wheel, Hwang says. In 1194 Sung Dynasty official Su Song built on this design to develop a 40-foot-tall (12-meter-tall) mechanical clock powered by a water wheel that worked much like the mechanical clocks that would be invented in Europe some 200 years later.

The ancient Chinese timekeeping system also divided each 24-hour day into two-hour segments. This system was also seen in ancient Japan and Korea, according to a 2004 paper in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

In modern times, an hour is always the same length, but ancient peoples around the world operated with a more complex system, says David Rooney, a historian of technology, former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, and author of About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks (W. W. Norton, 2021). Some ancient timekeeping systems divided the light portion of the day into 12 segments and the night into 12 segments, but because days and nights vary in length throughout the year except at the equator, these “seasonal hours” were different lengths from day to night and across the year.

“If your religion demands prayer time being linked to things like sunrise or sunset, or if you’re working in the fields, as most people did then, patterns of daylight and darkness matter more than this idea of a universal hour,” Rooney says.

Seasonal hours coexisted with universal hours until the 15th century in Europe and up until the 19th century in Japan, Rooney says. “We used to live with a much more complex—and rich and diverse—temporal culture,” he adds.

Religion was a major driver of the standardization of time across cultures, both across the year and day to day, Gautschy says. In ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia (today approximately Iraq and Turkey) and Greece, people developed lunar calendars to track rituals and feast days, she says, whereas people in Egypt focused more on the solar calendar and also had a calendar based on the star Sirius. People of Islamic cultures, Rooney says, used water clocks to track prayer and fasting, whereas Christians developed the mechanical clock in 14th-century Europe as a way to schedule prayer.

The bottom line, Rooney says, is that humans have been temporal creatures for far longer than the industrial age—although not always happily. After the Romans installed their first public sundial in 263 B.C.E., he says, the Roman playwright Plautus objected to the new fad of timekeeping via a character in one of his plays: “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and—yes—who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits for poor me! You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest compared to all of these…. But now what there is, isn’t eaten unless the sun says so. In fact, town’s so stuffed with sundials that most people crawl along, shriveled up with hunger.”

It’s a strikingly modern thought for being 2,200 years old, Rooney says. “That could be written in the 21st century and spoken in any office,” he says, “that we’re under the tyranny of the clock.”

Original article here

06 Mar 2023
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Mayan Equinox Forecast

A Mayan Report for the year beginning on 2 IK and 8 MANIK.

Equinox cycle from 3-21-2023 to 3-20-2024

A forecast blending the energies of two sacred Mayan Calendars.

Flowing in the Power Of Pure Spirit

Mayan Kiche’ “Cholq’ij Traditional Calendar.

The Calendar of the Heart. (Spirit Reality)

Mayan year of 2 IK (Wind)

The numbers in the Mayan calendar are the power that drives the cycles of time. With the power of 2 (KIEB), we will begin to see forward movement where we will find ways to balance the polarities. We will begin to feel much needed relief as we move away from the 1 (Jun) year where we were in a semi stalled situation and it was hard to make anything manifest. But also the year before that was a 13 year period where it triggered a lot of powerful endings and clearings of old programs. The last age will begin to move into the rear view mirror as we enter the second half of the very first Katun in this new cycle (20 years). There is so much possibility in front of us now. We may not know what is coming for us yet, but it is going to be fresh, new and full of surprises. We will find empowering ways to navigate and heal the huge polarities that the last few years of major endings had created. The old polarized state of mind always accelerates with the falling of an old age.

The day sign of IK (Wind), is hard to contain in a boundary. It is the wind and in an instant the winds can kick up and change everything. We are learning to become comfortable with uncertainty and this year will test that wisdom. It will be a year that if we hang on to anything that is out of balance, the wind will simply beat us up. There are always those who hang on and want to keep things the same and feed their illusion of safety. But then there are the courageous warriors who are not afraid of the unknown and the huge potential out in front of us. Being flexible and going with the flow will make life less stressful and less painful especially when we stay open to all the surprising new possibilities. It will be a good year for ones who can tune into the subtleness of spirit. Also those who are creative by nature, you could initiate loads of new life altering ideas. Both the number 2 and IK are about spirit, and not the material world. If your spiritual life has felt stalled the last few years this could change now as well. We are being birthed into a new cycle and anything is possible.

Birthing a New Community of Creative Cooperation

Mayan Astrology Yucatec Calendar.

The Calendar of the Mind (Physical Reality)

Mayan year of 8 Manik (Hand)

The number 8 will bring the much-needed essence of harmonization, healing and community spirit. This will assist humanity in finding a new balance in all areas of life and bring spirit into manifestation. It is a gracious bridge between what was and what will be, and a step beyond old polarities. It is about restructuring and the new world will begin to take form. It is a time of being experimental and learning what will manifest now and what will not. It is also a number where we become more open to other perspectives and belief systems where in the past cycle it was very polarizing. We will be able to breathe easier in this energy and all the changes and budding new creations will be easier to adjust to.

The day sign of MANIK is known for its ability to dive deep into community work. But it also serves as a healing bridge between opposite desires. We may want freedom but we are also not too fond of responsibility. We could be torn between two opposites a lot this year. It is a good time to listen to the heart, as the heart does not lie, but the overactive mind will. The lesson for this equinox cycle is to find a bridge between the need for freedom and being interdependent in a community project. This cycle could bring the birth of innovative projects. The choice to move forward in any new endeavors will feel overwhelming this year as we will be in new territory with no roadmap, but once the choice is made it will only empower us.

Manik has the ability to be traditional and also embrace more eccentric focuses which can trigger unconventional live choices. It can be very creative. It can inspire the inner artist, musician, poet or writer, but we need to be flexible to see the new creations and not become distracted by outer or external tools. The extreme distraction with outer spiritual tools, (examples… crystals, books, workshops, etc) is a past echo of some of the issues we had in Atlantis, which caused the unbalanced energy that was the beginning of the fall of that age. We will need to move out of the head and the material world and come back into the heart over and over again.

This calendar cycle finishes up with 40 days+ of extremely powerful days. We will travel through the second 20 Core Day Ascension Portal, flanked on either side with 10 galactic portal days. Hang on to your hiking boots! This cycle will end with a bang!

(The astronomical equinox is March 20th at 2:24 pm MST. But the Maya Elders in Guatemala always celebrate in various sacred sites in Mexico and Guatemala, etc, on the 21st. Let us send these Elders our heart energy and give thanks for them remembering and maintaining this cosmic wisdom.)

via Aluna Joy

11 Feb 2023
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Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are ‘Illusions’

This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?

Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google’s quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.

But why is entanglement related to space and time? And how can it be important for future physics breakthroughs? Properly understood, entanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole. It is a defining property of quantum mechanics that its underlying reality is described in terms of waves, and a monistic universe would require a universal function. Already decades ago, researchers such as Hugh Everett and Dieter Zeh showed how our daily-life reality can emerge out of such a universal quantum-mechanical description. But only now are researchers such as Leonard Susskind or Sean Carroll developing ideas on how this hidden quantum reality might explain not only matter but also the fabric of space and time.

Entanglement is much more than just another weird quantum phenomenon. It is the acting principle behind both why quantum mechanics merges the world into one and why we experience this fundamental unity as many separate objects. At the same time, entanglement is the reason why we seem to live in a classical reality. It is—quite literally—the glue and creator of worlds. Entanglement applies to objects comprising two or more components and describes what happens when the quantum principle that “everything that can happen actually happens” is applied to such composed objects. Accordingly, an entangled state is the superposition of all possible combinations that the components of a composed object can be in to produce the same overall result. It is again the wavy nature of the quantum domain that can help to illustrate how entanglement actually works.

Picture a perfectly calm, glassy sea on a windless day. Now ask yourself, how can such a plane be produced by overlaying two individual wave patterns? One possibility is that superimposing two completely flat surfaces results again in a completely level outcome. But another possibility that might produce a flat surface is if two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle were to be superimposed on one another, so that the wave crests of one pattern annihilate the wave troughs of the other one and vice versa. If we just observed the glassy ocean, regarding it as the result of two swells combined, there would be no way for us to find out about the patterns of the individual swells. What sounds perfectly ordinary when we talk about waves has the most bizarre consequences when applied to competing realities. If your neighbor told you she had two cats, one live cat and a dead one, this would imply that either the first cat or the second one is dead and that the remaining cat, respectively, is alive—it would be a strange and morbid way of describing one’s pets, and you may not know which one of them is the lucky one, but you would get the neighbor’s drift. Not so in the quantum world. In quantum mechanics, the very same statement implies that the two cats are merged in a superposition of cases, including the first cat being alive and the second one dead and the first cat being dead while the second one lives, but also possibilities where both cats are half alive and half dead, or the first cat is one-third alive, while the second feline adds the missing two-thirds of life. In a quantum pair of cats, the fates and conditions of the individual animals get dissolved entirely in the state of the whole. Likewise, in a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.”

I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”

— Nathan Seiberg, Institute for Advanced Study

Quantum entanglement reveals to us a vast and entirely new territory to explore. It defines a new foundation of science and turns our quest for a theory of everything upside down—to build on quantum cosmology rather than on particle physics or string theory. But how realistic is it for physicists to pursue such an approach? Surprisingly, it is not just realistic—they are actually doing it already. Researchers at the forefront of quantum gravity have started to rethink space-time as a consequence of entanglement. An increasing number of scientists have come to ground their research in the nonseparability of the universe. Hopes are high that by following this approach they may finally come to grasp what space and time, deep down at the foundation, really are.

Whether space is stitched together by entanglement, physics is described by abstract objects beyond space and time or the space of possibilities represented by Everett’s universal wave function, or everything in the universe is traced back to a single quantum object—all these ideas share a distinct monistic flavor. At present it is hard to judge which of these ideas will inform the future of physics and which will eventually disappear. What’s interesting is that while originally ideas were often developed in the context of string theory, they seem to have outgrown string theory, and strings play no role anymore in the most recent research. A common thread now seems to be that space and time are not considered fundamental anymore. Contemporary physics doesn’t start with space and time to continue with things placed in this preexisting background. Instead, space and time themselves are considered products of a more fundamental projector reality. Nathan Seiberg, a leading string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, is not alone in his sentiment when he states, “I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.” Moreover, in most scenarios proposing emergent space-times, entanglement plays the fundamental role. As philosopher of science Rasmus Jaksland points out, this eventually implies that there are no individual objects in the universe anymore; that everything is connected with everything else: “Adopting entanglement as the world making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world (and perhaps all the other possible ones).” Thus, when space and time disappear, a unified One emerges.

Conversely, from the perspective of quantum monism, such mind-boggling consequences of quantum gravity are not far off. Already in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, space is no static stage anymore; rather it is sourced by matter’s masses and energy. Much like the German philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz’s view, it describes the relative order of things. If now, according to quantum monism, there is only one thing left, there is nothing left to arrange or order and eventually no longer a need for the concept of space on this most fundamental level of description. It is “the One,” a single quantum universe that gives rise to space, time, and matter.

“GR=QM,” Leonard Susskind claimed boldly in an open letter to researchers in quantum information science: general relativity is nothing but quantum mechanics—a hundred-year-old theory that has been applied extremely successfully to all sorts of things but never really entirely understood. As Sean Carroll has pointed out, “Maybe it was a mistake to quantize gravity, and space-time was lurking in quantum mechanics all along.” For the future, “rather than quantizing gravity, maybe we should try to gravitize quantum mechanics. Or, more accurately but less evocatively, ‘find gravity inside quantum mechanics,’” Carroll suggests on his blog. Indeed, it seems that if quantum mechanics had been taken seriously from the beginning, if it had been understood as a theory that isn’t happening in space and time but within a more fundamental projector reality, many of the dead ends in the exploration of quantum gravity could have been avoided. If we had approved the monistic implications of quantum mechanics—the heritage of a three-thousand-year-old philosophy that was embraced in antiquity, persecuted in the Middle Ages, revived in the Renaissance, and tampered with in Romanticism—as early as Everett and Zeh had pointed them out rather than sticking to the influential quantum pioneer Niels Bohr’s pragmatic interpretation that reduced quantum mechanics to a tool, we would be further on the way to demystifying the foundations of reality.

Original article here

23 Sep 2022
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The 5 Most Common Regrets of the Dying—and What We Can Learn From Them

Life has sped up. A never-ending stream of stimuli is vying for your attention every minute of the day. Some of it is fabulous and some of it is time wasting.

So how do you decipher how to spend your time?

The answer: you face the fact that you are actually going to die one day and that your time is sacred.

The more awareness you can bring to this, the more it will support you to live well, by being true to the life that makes the most sense to your heart, not the life dictated by society or others.

To understand the sacredness of your time and to realise the power that lies in the decisions you make, it helps to learn from those who have gone before you, from those who have not made the right decisions and have spent their deathbed days in the anguish and pain of regret.

By looking at the most common regrets of the dying, as shared with me during my years as a palliative carer, you might find yourself at a turning point, one where you can recognise the power of your choice from this moment onwards.

Regrets of the Dying: I Wish I’d Lived a Life True to Myself, Not the Life Others Expected of Me

As a child, it was natural to mirror your primary caregivers. It was how you learnt. There was no real choice but to adapt to whatever their beliefs and lifestyles were. Your parents or caregivers may have made plenty of mistakes or done a lot of things right, but either way, they were living from their own life experiences and reactions, doing their best as who they were at the time.

Then the individual calling becomes more prominent, your heart awakens, and you realise that your own beliefs and preferences may not actually be aligned to those you have been raised with. And so begins the healing of realising you are not living a life true to yourself, but rather the life that is expected of you.

Dying people realised they had not found enough courage to live true to their own heart’s voice and it left them in depths of grief for a life not lived honestly to themselves.

Life is calling you now to find that courage and step into your own joy. Realise the sacredness of your time.

Regrets of the Dying: I Wish I Hadn’t Worked so Hard

There is nothing wrong with loving your work, and it’s brilliant if you do. But whether you do or don’t, it is easy to get caught up in never switching off from it properly. This is even truer in a society whose very lifeblood is supported by technology.

Dying people learnt too late that there needed to be more in their lives than work. When it was taken away from them, there was nothing left: no identity to support them, no stimulus to inspire them, no joy.

They realised they needed more work life balance in their lives, and a commitment to other areas of their lives. Most admitted it was fear that had kept them glued to their career: fear of lack with money, fear of judgment from work peers, and fear of failure.

By creating space and also honouring other areas of life, you can bring more efficiency to your working life anyway. And of course, you then bring more joy.

Regrets of the Dying: I Wish I’d Had the Courage to Express My Feelings

When children are sad, they cry. When they’re angry, they vent. When they’re scared, they say so. When they’re happy, they dance.

Expressing your feelings was once a natural part of who you were. As you mature you learn how to be less scared, for example. You learn life skills to help you navigate through various emotions and see things from different perspectives.

A lot of these skills support you. But some of them hinder your natural expressions, until over time, you think it is normal to never be vulnerable or express yourself honestly. Of course, this feels even more normal since most of those around you are doing the same.

It can take immense courage to express yourself, whether that is by being vulnerable and sharing your love, or being strong and sticking up for yourself. But it is absolutely vital to do so if you are going to live your fullest life – the one that makes the most sense to your heart, and the one that will ensure you don’t join the ranks of dying people living their last days with the heart-wrenching anguish of regret.

By facing your fear and expressing yourself one piece at a time, you can develop the habit of speaking honestly with emotional maturity. You can set yourself free and inspire others to do the same.

Regrets of the Dying: I Wish I Had Stayed in Touch With My Friends

In a world where it is almost impossible to lose contact with friends, thanks to the likes of social media, this regret may seem irrelevant. You can send someone a text to say you’re thinking of them, comment on their Facebook feed or Instagram photo, or chat via Messenger. But how long is it since you’ve really connected with these people in real life? How long since you’ve laughed together, cried together, eaten together or just hung out?

Real life connection is the essence of well-being. It is natural that some friends may fall away as your lifestyles and tastes change. New friends can come into your life through various channels like work, technology, sport, or shared interests such as book clubs or meet-up groups.

Dying people regretted not staying in touch with their old friends, though, because during their last weeks they wanted to reminisce, laugh about the old days, feel understood, and remember they once belonged in an easier world.

Text messages and brief contact is better than none. But making the effort for real-life time together is some of the best medicine you can give yourself for a regret-free life.

Regrets of the Dying: I Wish I Had Allowed Myself to Be Happier

Happiness is a choice – it doesn’t come from being lucky. It is not a denial of the hard times. Without the contrast you can never know how strong you really are, what you can rise to, or what your potential truly is. The hard times have their purpose, to help you discover all that. But how long you choose to stay focused on the hard times and their associated stories is your own choice.

You can choose happiness in many ways. Choose to find the blessings rather than allowing others to dictate your sense of worth. Don’t stay stuck in old stories. And always find things to be grateful for, regardless of your circumstances.

Every time you take ownership of your focus and steer it towards something that leaves you feeling a little better, you are opening your heart and life up to more happiness. Life is not a penance. It is a precious gift of time.

The realisation that dying people had around this, and seeing how they had allowed other people to determine their worthiness for happiness, brought incredible insights to them, and heart-wrenching regret.

It is your life. Choose your own focus.

Every single decision you can make and every single snippet of courage you can find, to ensure you are living true to your own heart, takes you further away from the anguish and heartbreak of regret. And the more courageous you are, the more the world also benefits. After all, we are all in this together.

Excerpted from The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware