I got dinner with D recently, a former teacher of mine. He was telling me about teenagers who dream of business management and annual bonuses. I joked how fruitless my five-year planning was back then. Why bother? I dreamed of space, world domination, and … MD-PhD programs. D told me how kids and their parents asked him what needed to be done now, in the 10th grade, so that they can go to Wharton. They’re going to be such different people in the next year what’s the point of planning? And D reminded me that dreams are something we practice too. I told him that I’ve given up on making five-year plans.

clock cycles

I’ve fallen into a routine where vacation has become a necessity rather than a want. I evenly space my vacations out over the year: four one-week vacations every three months. They say that the days are long but the years are short. It shouldn’t be this way, but when you live vacation to vacation it’s hard to perceive time any other way. It’s a shame, really. The ability to operate on multiple time scales is what gives life its temperental engine and its infinite beauty. We can be both the tortoise and the hummingbird.

Growing up I learned that a faster CPU is a better CPU. The more instructions it could execute in one second the better. I chastised myself for not getting things done quickly enough, and these days there is just not enough time outside of work so I need to move faster, I say. You can only overclock the CPU for so long, and if you push it too much, it might become unstable: unable to complete the set of instructions before the next rising edge.

We can not change when the sun rises but that does not mean we are restricting to operating at the same rate. There’s so much to do in the city and the days easily become overwhelming. By no means is there only one way to change this experience I describe, though I often notice that the underlying cause behind such unpleasant realizations are my misguided expectations. I don’t actually need to finish everything by the end of the day. I’m sure everyone has heard some version of ‘time is a social construct’ at some point in recent years and almost certainly in a negative context. Rather, embrace the ability to operate with whatever clock you define. And no, the 9-5 job is not an life sentence to the 24 hour day …

days, weeks, years

Life obviously did not go according to my five-year plans, and foolishly I came to think that meant they were useless. Five years ago, I was in London for a university summer program and there I decided I would commit my life to mathematics. Five years before that, I had already commited my life to molecular biology. Roughly three years ago was when I stopped trying to plan more than one year ahead.

When I stopped making plans for the future, I stopped thinking about who I wanted to be, and over time I began to lose sight of who I am right now. I was certainly living in more in-the-present, but at the end of the year when one habitually looks back at the path they’ve taken, I saw roundabout loops, backtracking, and very little distance net-traversed. So focused on each day I never stopped to take stock of what I had actually done, and when catching up with friends I found I often had little to say. The opposite of the problem I once had: I was once too focused on my future goals to acknowledge the present. Where previously I found ways to anxiously plan things that did not need to be planned I now filled with aggressive, greedy maximization. What delusions!

I had it backwards for many years. Allow the body to tell you what it wants, then plot the course with the mind, not the other way around!Dreams are often depicted within the brain but they draw on your entire lived bodily experience. When I lived in the five year plans I was unable to dream of tomorrow and when I lived day to day I could not fatham the volume of the year. Like most complex systems, the body is simulatenously operating at multiple paces:

    Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous,

    slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and

    by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.

Learn to listen to your body, and then dream like a child once again - of tomorrow and the next decade all at once.