Mumbled Musings

All Things Must Pass is the title of an album by George Harrison.   And he's right.  Nothing lasts forever.  Even the earth we stand on will at some point be destroyed by the anticipated expansion of the Sun as it swells up to become a red giant star in some 5 billion years - absorbing the innermost planets of the Solar System in the process.  I dare say most people have come across that fact at some point in their lives.  I don't think many of us are too bothered by it though.  A hundred years into the future is difficult enough to imagine.  Five billion is way more than our brains can cope with.

I am taking one of my periodic breaks off of Twitter at the moment. This might be a long one. The lockdown is bringing problems and opportunities.  I want to be totally undistracted to cope with the former and grab the latter. I enjoy the cut and thrust of Twitter. It’s a source of great deal of fun and also education. But I find it narrows my time horizon.  I enjoy the constant stream of novelty.  But it keeps my focus on now not the future.

We choose the mindset we need for a particular situation. We do it instinctively all the time.  We don’t bring the same set of behaviours to buying today’s lunch that we use to buying a house.  We’ve got a whole basket of bundles of decision making processes/social behaviours/action patterns that we switch between.  They are a bit like switching between programs on your computer - you use a word processor to write, a spreadsheet to do sums.