Bread and data

Timelessness

Time is relative; an hour sitting with
a pretty girl on a park bench passes
like a minute, but a minute sittin' on
a hot stove seems like an hour.
-Albert Einstein.
[The gods confound man who first found out how to distinguish hours! Confound him too, who in this place set up a sun-dial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small pieces! When I was a boy, my belly was my sun-dial—one more sure, truer, and more exact than any of them. This dial told me when twas proper time to go do dinner, when I ought to eat; But now-a-days, why even when I have, I can't fall to, unless the sun gives leave...]
-Titus Maccius Plautus, Hacked-up days (Sundial).
"Are we still in January?" Mayaki asked out of nowhere with great concern and astonishment. "Don't you notice the first month of the year always seems longer?" I paused to give some thoughts to his claim. "Yeah, it seems so." He raised his brows to the top of his head, to estimate how long we've been in January, I think. If he was a cartoon character, you'll probably see smoke coming out of his ears. "No, not just that. I think this year is particularly longer." He continued to build on his point. I know what he is getting at, it's the first month of the year and it feels like we've been in 2020 forever. "2020 is actually a leap year." I replied him with a sarcastic tone.
January which is the gateway to the new year, and in this case, a new decade is usually followed by unarchivable new year's resolution and outrageous proclamations, couldn't pass on any slower. New year's resolution seems like it's going to bite a dust pretty soon; chubby girls have already given up on their diet plans, young fellas already eyeing their piggybanks. For me, my goal in 2020 is to accomplish the goals I set in 2019 which should have been done in 2018 but I couldn't, due to some reasons I can't even remember. For most people new year means a new beginning, I wonder what a new decade means?
Unlike vision or hearing, we do not have a sensory organ that detects time (that's why you see humans with a piece of leather strap to their wrist), but that doesn't mean our mind is completely ignorant of time, or at least the perception of it. When Einstein wrote "time is relative," what he meant was our perception of time is directly proportional to what we are going through at the moment. We all know time is never enough when we are having a good time, and a bad time never seems to end. And having a bad day can actually make the day seem longer than it actually is, that's why you hear people say stuff like "it's been a long day," or "I had a long day." My mom always says the longest trip in her life was the day a call was put through to her from my brother's school, she got a call from his school that he has been admitted into the ICU, even though the drive was just a few hours away she insisted that was the longest ride of life. She keeps asking the driver, "are we not there yet?" We are talking about a woman that has traveled over 14hours within the states, but something about the sense of danger slowed down time for her. You know some people argue in physics that the most complicated phenomenon in physics after spacetime is space not time (I can't say I agree with them one hundred percent). Their argument being that space has three dimensions, namely width, breadth and height. And time only moves in one direction, forward. There are lots of stuffs we still don't understand about time; like now we have just right above us in space an incomprehensible amount of space. I think there will be in a certain place or time where time is infinite too, where all our fundamental knowledge of time fails, where all our compression of past, present and future fails. And if such a place or time exists, there should be a place where both space and time is endless too (an endless spacetime). This thus seems similar to where theologians referred to as the realm of souls, where both space and time is infinite. I don't know if such a place exists, but if it does it would be a nice place for souls to hangout. Because you see, not only is Time and Space relative, they are siblings. Time and Space are the unfortunate offspring of Spacetime, or more accurately Reality. As we know it, reality is a product of time and space, for any entity to be termed a real body it must occupy a space and have a duration. But Reality is not a product of Time and Space, he fathered them. Reality is self-sustenance, Time and Space exist individually. Reality unlike Time and Space has no unit. So far, we can't measure how real an object is or was. They all go hand-in-hand, and we can't have one without the other. And that's why an altercation to Time or Space can actually shape our perception of reality.

#Global lockdown
As for Twenty-twenty, it is going to be a pretty loooooong year. I always have a sensation 2020 is going to stand out among other years, it just has to be different, but this right here, is different different; at the beginning of the year, we already have a raging inferno in Australia, it almost wiped out half the species of animals there (bye bye koala). A deadly virus outbreak in China, they call it the COVID-19 (Corona Virus December-2019). Nuclear threats and possible World War III in sight. And all that was just in January alone. Around the first week of April, the world went on a global lockdown. Places that are unimaginable to go on breaks went on a full lockdown. International and local flights were canceled, football matches, graduation parties, wedding ceremonies and dick appointments, all were canceled! The world was literally brought to a pause, except that the earth was still spinning (probably). I have to say, the most difficult thing for me to accept was the fact that the world was actually in a lockdown! I mean, why couldn't we have foreseen that? We always seem like we got the button that pushes the world right under our palms. Humans are the only creatures on the planet that think about and plan for the distant future. We alone plant seeds that can take years to bear fruit or structures to last across centuries. And yet, the Corona virus pandemic swept the earth as if modern man was myopic. On the personal level a myriad of financial and health problems are related to our partial myopia. Financial difficulties such as credit card debit and retirement shortfalls, are often the consequences of shortsighted actions: either spending money we don't have or failing to save for the future. Additionally, we always often succumb to the short-term gratification of an unhealthy diet, fail to exercise, keep distance while contagious, or in this case, staying away from eating a freaking damn bat.
The human mind is a fascinating thing, but it's a mess. Maybe because it has evolved over millions of years, there are all sorts of processes jumbled together rather than logically organized. Some of the processes are optimized for only certain kinds of situations, while others don't work as well as they could. The human mind tends to amplify and elaborate danger more than it is actually—it's a defensive mechanism, I think. The bigger you perceive threats and either run away from it or fight back, the more likely you'll survive. But the world is actually more complicated than that, some scary things are not that scary as they seem, and others are better handled by standing your ground. I learned a very important lesson when I first made it to Kano; I saw a first-grade military camo pant hanging outside a ten-cent store when I went to town and decided to ask the woman in the store for the price whimsically. The price she called it was so ridiculous, I just had to buy it. Never given much thought to it honestly—cause I know I can't wear the camo out without being harassed for impersonating a military personnel. Fortunately for me, the apartment I was staying at in Kano was just a few blocks away from the military barrack. The barrack so has an entrance leading from my side to the nearest bus stop that goes to town. Most of the time when I wear the camo pants I don't go near the barrack at all. And then one day while I had the camo on, I had to meet up with someone in town and have little time to change, so that day I decided to wear the camo pass the barrack. When I got into the barrack I couldn't turn my head, my legs were all stiffed up, I was walking as if I couldn't bend my knees. I try to harden my face a little bit as I walk-by not to look too much like a civilian. But nothing happened, in fact I could have worn a full camo and still walk within the barrack unquestioned (but I'll leave that for another person to try out). It was that day I realized, the safest place to wear a camo pant is inside the barrack. It is as Peregrin Took said in the second part of the Lord of the ring trilogy. "The closer we are to danger, the farther we are from harm."
There's a prophecy in Islam that around the end of time, a man is going to come, he's going to come and terrorize the world for forty days; the first day of his terror will be like a year, the second like a month, and the third like a week and rest like the normal days we are used to. I think the length of the days are just to measure the magnitude of his terror. The more elaborated the sense of danger the slower the time, or more accurately our perception of it.
Relax, I'm not here to scare you about the end of time or anything like that, if anything we learned from history is, this is not the first time a pandemic will ravage the earth, it's not even the worst. Compared to the plague, the coronavirus pandemic is just a sleazy bat next to a Godzilla. And also, we know for certain mankind is the only creature that thrives under chaos. If you look at it, all the technological and medical advancement we enjoy today is as a result of extinction threats. At first staying at home was kind of hard, it felt like it's going to last forever, but I got used to it and now I'm not sure if I want to go back to the old "normal" again. Jhumpa Lahiri called this expectation of normalcy "an ephemeral pregnancy"; an uncomfortable wait for something impossible to define—of course things will go back to normal, but not the old normal you're used to, a new kind of normal that'll perfectly fit the situation that's yet to come.